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!
