WHAT ARE THE MOST INTERESTING STORIES ABOUT DAIICT PLACEMENT ?

            WHAT ARE THE MOST INTERESTING STORIES ABOUT DAIICT PLACEMENT ?

One of my friends (let's call him X) had very average grades going into final year and placement season. This was in the days when companies  were still in the process of discovering DAIICT (I hope things are much better now) and a "top placement" meant a big Indian IT services firm (I'm quite certain things are much better now!)

Back to our story - while most of us got placed in companies like TCS, Infy, Mindtree, Interra etc in our 7th Sem, X struggled to get placed even in the final sem - it must've been quite tough for him to see all his friends enjoying themselves with peace of mind while he had to fight self-doubt (my guess), explicit pressure from family (I think his Dad felt he needed to "improve" a bit), and a lot of implicit peer pressure. Soon, most of the 200+ batch were placed and companies coming to campus became more rare as they probably knew the cream of the batch (at least in terms of GPA/CPI) was taken. What I found most surprising was that it wasn't for lack of technical competency that he wasn't getting placed, as there were dozens like me who had been selected for a nameless firm without displaying anything of the sort.

One day, a different kind of firm arrived hoping to discover a unique sort of talent which was still untapped. I don't think they really expected to hire a single person at our campus and were just testing the waters. They took a "technical" test which my friend happened to pass with flying colours - something he hadn't done previously. It just so happened that he had a different sort of "technical" competence - which most of us never had a chance to discover in  DAIICT; a competency for "quant" to put in a single word. This "different" firm was known for its derivatives trading desks, and it had hit upon the exact profile it had dreamed of.

X never looked back, as unlike most of us, he had discovered his passion. He won awards there for algorithmic trading (back when no one outside finance had heard of the term), and moved on to the US of A where he now serves as a technical expert for financial markets in the Fed Reserve Bank (yes, America's RBI :-)

Hope to see him on the front page of Indian newspapers someday like Satya Nadella!