Skip to main content

Campus Interviews

I just came back from a three day campus interview tour. The campus was really beautiful and the placement cell people showed great hospitality to our team. The students were average in terms of academic quality but most of them had good spoken English. What was appalling though was that the majority had awful writing skills. We had an essay that the students had to write and most of them wrote pieces that were not comprehensible.

Some observations…

  1. The students were very focussed on the salary package, as if salary was the end of the world
  2. Not a single student had any in-depth knowledge of their subjects they were studying. In fact, at other times, most of them would find it tough to get a job at all.
  3. A college official told me that the average cost (all-inclusive) that a student needs to spend in 4 years is around 11~12 lakhs. That means there are a lot of parents who would spent a lot of money to educate their children.
  4. Our company does a very poor job of presenting itself in the PPT (pre placement talk). It seems that people who never visit campuses for placements prepare these presentations. They have very little relevance to what the students want to see in a good ppt. The presentation should be focussed more on bringing out how we are better compared to our competitors, specially the Indian ones as they pose the biggest challenge to us.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Oil, Liquidity and the Sensex @ 12K

The BSE Sensex – the default benchmark for the Indian equity market – touched 12,000 on Friday last week. There is a sense of euphoria, disbelief and caution in people depending on which group they belong to. There are people who have been waiting for a correction from 6000 and are amazed to see the sensex at double that. There are others who are perennial optimists and expect the market to continue giving them the returns in the way it has in the last 3 years. Milestones like 12000 are a nice point to just stand back and access the overall situation. So, what is the reality of the day? Today, the price of oil is hovering around $70 with the political situation in Iran not getting a whole lot better. Don’t think its going to come down in a while. Interest rates are showing signs of hardening. Prices of gold, silver, steel, aluminium, copper, zinc and sugar are in multi year highs. Real estate prices are going through the roof. So, in a way all asset classes are seeing handsome app...

Porfolio Structuring (PS) Step 1: Evaluate Current Status

The first step to any long term investment plan is to understand where we are at present. So, to start with you need to list down your existing networth. For example, you can have a list as follows: Provident Fund 100,000 PPF 50,000 Bank FD 50,000 Mutual Funds-Equity 150,000 Mutual Funds-Debt 50,000 Cash In Savings Account 30,000 House 2,000,000 Housing Loan -4,000,000 Others 0 Total -1,570,000 A couple of things to note here. 1. I am not calculating the value of any gold/silver jewellery that you may be having. Indians, typically are not very keen on selling their family gold/silver so it really does not count as investment. You can think of it as an additional bonus if you do have gold/silver. 2. I am including the housing loan you may have as a negative here under the assumption that that is your primary home and not a second home bought for investment purpose. Also, I am ...

13 years to become an expert

In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, a study done by Anders Ericsson on violinists shows that it takes about 10000 (ten thousand) hours of practice to become an expert at something. When I read this for the first time, I was fascinated by the fact that it takes such a long time of dedicated effort to become really good at something. Today, I was reading a book on trading strategies and it mentioned that a traders life is divided into decades. The first decade he makes his mistakes, the second decade he makes his money and the third decade he enjoys the money. That set me calculating and trying to tie Gladwell with the traders cycle. If a person spends 3 hours per day for 5 days a week for 52 weeks a year, he will need about 13 years to be an expert at trading. And that is assuming that he is passionate about it in the first place. So, now we know, why we haev so many people failing as traders. It's just that they have not served their time as yet!!