Term 5 is over. The final exams are on Monday and Tuesday. The placement starts on next Saturday (Jan 8th). Campus is suffering from placement blues.

I have to prepare both for technical (for companies such as MS, Yahoo, Amazon ) and also for HR (for IT services companies) interviews. Currently I am running out of time. I usually sleep by 12 but now I am sleeping at 2. Still, I have covered only a small portion of what is needed to be covered for the interviews.

In this interview preperation confusion, I am not submitting good EOIs. I am unsatisfied by my EOIs and my only console is that most of the companies don't read EOIs. Shortlists will be coming by next week. Hope I will be shortlisted for interviews for the companies I am aiming for.

The blogs may not be regular till Jan 8th. But I will try to post daily once the Placement starts.

Still, we have not yet settled on scheduling the companies ... This is taking a lot more time than expected ...

And my placement prep is moving at a very slow pace. I am also confused whether to target small companies with high-pay or take a pay-cut to enter into large brands. As I am looking only for IT, my options are limited. May be, I should apply to one or two marketing companies as a back-up.

And campus is getting ready for placements ....Everyone looks serious. There are a lot of discussion going on about what companies to apply and how to prepare for interviews. Everyone looks worried. ... Placement blues ...

Yesterday I met an interesting person - Joseph Sigelman, CEO and co-founder of Office Tiger. I spent nearly an hour with him and his team. He was here for the pre-placement talk and I was in-charge for the talk. He is a Harvard graduate and had a lot of respect for the ISB. He didn't have any powerpoint slides but made the session very interactive and engaging. He offered very senior roles such as head of operations, Acquisition Manager etc. As far as I have seen, people from BPOs are very interesting ...

In Novartis (International)PPT, the HR manager said that they have recruited only from the ISB till now and from this year, they are thinking of going to IIM A,IIMB and XLRI. It seems Novartis is very impressed with the ISB and has decided to hire mostly Indians for worldwide positions.

Today YSR Reddy, CM of AP was here for inaugurating k-hub. K-hub is an initiative by centre of entrepreneurship, where they will fund entrepreneurs of AP. A lot of security measures were there and we were made to wait for half-an-hour for his ten minute speech. Let me not speak politics here :)

Tomorrow will be the last day for the preplacement talks. We have seven PPTs scheduled tomorrow all after 7 PM. I think it is going to be a hectic task to handle these.

Today I organized PPT for Fidelity. Fidelity is here primarily for IT roles and the job and pay were attractive. Finance guys were little disappointed as they didn't have roles in Asset management. I then attended Computer Sciences Corporation PPT. I wanted to apply for this, but the company required minimum of three years of experience ( I have two and half) and is not lenient in this constraint. So I will not be able to apply for this.

Yesterday I was in-charge for Google. For me, Google role was not as attractive as Amazon or Microsoft. I am interested in Product Manager roles while Google is here for Business Service Manager type of role. But still I would be applying for Google. Come on, its Google !!

Today it was a pretty relaxing day ... Had only one class ... Operations Strategy. The class was good and Professor Bassok is rocking ...

Somehow we PLACOM guys have managed to rank and schedule the companies for interviews. We have come up with a first-cut draft and have circulated it to students ... I am hoping for a lot of feedback and the schedule might even change dramatically.

Our ELP ends on 27th but there's a lot of pending work to be done. I have to think on scheduling the ELP activities and Placement prep accordingly so that one is not affecting the other ....

Yesterday I had a chance to chat with a Senior manager from XANSA, a BPO company, after the preplacement talk. Actually after the talk, my whole perspective about BPO changed. I was thinking of BPO as more of a call centre, false identity and American accent type of thing ... He mentioned that they don't take low-end work such as call centres and described the typical work. He was from IIML and said that BPO is challenging as it combines both Operations and People management ( He said that atleast 30 people will be reporting to me if I join as a Manager). Anyway now I have some respect for BPOs and see a good opportunity there.

Today I was with Raja Shanmugam, Director of Business Development from Mindtree. He is a down-to-earth person and said that humility is one of the characters they are looking for when they come for recruitment in Top Bschools. Mindtree is here for overseas positions mostly in US or Singapore. One good aspect of being a placement committee member is this opportunity to interact with key people from industry.

Today I was chatting with an alum from Microsoft. He was saying that the life there was pretty relaxing. I was assuming that Microsoft will be drilling its employees and was surprised to hear that it was otherwise.

I was going through some of the sample questions from MS interview. There are a lot of hardcore OS, datastruture and Algorithm questions. Sad part is that these questions will be thrown only to the guys who have Computer Engineering degree. Other guys will have a non-technical interview it seems.

I am far behind in terms of Interview Prep. I have to brush up project management / SDLC concepts, read books on Domain knowledge and HR questions, browse some websites on OS/Datastrucure basics .... Phew ... And I have only some 20 days left ... In these 20 days, I have to wrap up my ELP, my assignments and give two exams ...