Students’ Speak: Follow these 6 tips to improve your pre-placement preparation

By: Shrikant Jha

Pre-placement preparation can give you a strong competitive edge over others during campus drives as well as off-campus placements. Shrikant Jha shares useful tips to get more out of your pre-placement preparation and form a long-term preparation strategy.

Pre-placement preparation can always give you a competitive edge over other candidates, if done correctly. It is even better from the perspective of off-campus placement where you are competing with students from various institutes. However, you need to tweak your preparation a bit as per requirements of a specific company and work profile.

Why do we need pre-placement preparation?

There is definitely some pressure and stress over us during actual placement preparation. The reasons can be manifold and some of them are listed below:

1. You are still unprepared and a big fraction of your college students has already completed preparation.
2. You have earlier studied several topics or numerical problems but haven’t revised or practised them in a long time.
3. You haven’t prepared at all. However, you are somewhat serious now about placements. Yet the time has arrived for revision and practice, not to build core concepts from scratch. And a job is what you need right now.

To prevent such regrets later on, you need to take a stand and start your preparations today.

NOTE: The candidates should stay informed about any kind of placement activity happening in the college. Try to maintain good contacts with faculty, placement coordinators or even be part of the coordinating team.

What to do and how to do? (Chapters/Preparation Strategy)

Whatever you study, don’t start from scratch. Focus on understanding the concepts and practice sufficient questions based on those concepts. Revise regularly to embed concepts into your long-term memory.

1. Aptitude: The easiest section to start with is Aptitude. The questions are easy enough to solve but what we need here is good problem-solving speed. Buy any popular book or borrow it and start solving problems. Strong performance in the Aptitude test is necessary to get shortlisted for further rounds. Many candidates who are good in Programming, Data Structures (DS) and even core subjects can suffer in placement drives if they fail to perform in the test.
2. Programming Language: Learning and developing a strong grip over any programming language requires religious dedication and time.
   • Work on implementation
   • Study Algorithms and Data Structures
   • Practise online on Hacker Rank, Hacker Earth, Code Chef, etc.
   • Revise basic concepts
3. Subject Basics (Core): The foundations are equally important as well. They can often trick you during interviews, MCQs or technical aptitude. Therefore, you need your core to be strong here as a hammer. You should have clarity about the following topics:
   • DBMS
   • Operating Systems
   • Computer Networks

Pre-placement preparation tips

Now that we have some basic overview of what we have to study, let's discuss some tips for pre-placement preparation:

1. Be an early starter and grab that free bonus time. Rather than having regrets later for not studying, utilize the available time properly.
2. Take your preparation to a higher level by analysing companies who visited campus in the past, their placement process and hiring pattern
3. Be consistent and break any kind of barrier to help you move a step closer to your goal
4. It is recommended to keep track of your preparation progress. This will help you control the overall preparation in an organized manner.
5. Try various online test series to practice MCQs
6. Work on your grammar and comprehension, so that you don’t stutter during the test

All that matters is how well you perform in the test. Do some yoga regularly to relax your mind and stay stress-free. Try some outdoor games, light sprint, push-ups, etc. and eat healthy.

About the Author:

Shrikant Jha is an experienced developer and an Open-Source enthusiast.  He is currently pursuing B.Tech from Galgotias University and hails from Agra. He has always been passionate about hackathons and competitive coding. In his leisure time, he loves to read mythological books and practice yoga.