Placement guides
Short, opinionated notes on the parts of placement season that are process rather than skill — the things nobody teaches you and everybody figures out too late.
Reading an eligibility clause properly
Most students self-reject from drives they qualify for, and burn evenings on drives they never did. Both come from skimming the criteria.
Covers: why “no active backlogs” and “no backlogs” are different clauses; what happens when a cutoff is stated on percentage rather than CGPA; which criteria a company actually enforces at the resume-shortlist stage versus which are stated and quietly ignored; and why an unstated criterion is a question for the CDC office rather than an assumption.
The 48 hours before an OA
Preparation at this range is not about learning anything new. It is about not losing marks to logistics.
Covers: confirming the platform and testing it before the day; what “custom judge” and strict output formats mean for how you print answers; sectional timing and whether you can move back; negative marking and what it does to guessing strategy; and building a checklist for the ten minutes before the window opens.
The memory bank habit
The single highest-return habit of a placement season, and the one most people start three months too late.
Covers: why you write the entry within an hour of walking out, not that evening; what to record beyond the questions themselves — the shape of the round, the interviewer's follow-ups, what you fumbled; how a batch that shares memory banks compounds an advantage over one that does not; and what to reread the night before a repeat round.
One resume per profile, not one resume
A single resume sent to an SDE drive, an analyst drive and a quant drive is optimised for none of them.
Covers: how many variants are worth maintaining (fewer than you think); which sections actually change between them and which never should; what an ATS keyword filter does and does not look at; and how to keep variants in sync when a project or a grade updates.
Tracking a season without a spreadsheet
- The four statuses that actually matter, and why more granularity slows you down.
- What to log at the moment you apply, so you are not reconstructing it a month later.
- How to tell a stalled application from a rejected one nobody told you about.
- Reading your own pipeline: what a season's worth of tracked drives tells you about where you are losing rounds.