Students’ Speak: How should engineering students prepare for Placements?

By: Akshay Sharma 

Placements are very crucial for engineering students. However, many goof up due to lack of experience. Akshay Sharma shares some important tips and tricks for engineering students to approach each round during a typical campus placement process.

If you are currently pursuing any engineering programme and the placement session is about to commence at your institute then make sure you are well prepared to face every type of interview and eligibility test. Most of the companies conduct an aptitude and reasoning test. This test assess your knowledge, mental ability and overall persona. Some companies also ask for a technical test. You should therefore check out the tests that were conducted during previous year placement session.

In Guru Nanak University, the placement session starts in the month of July. In campus placements, the first test will be Aptitude and Reasoning test. Therefore, start your preparation for it at least 3-4 months in advance and give test series to familiarize yourself with the test. Make your resume in advance for avoiding last minute hassles during interviews. Our resume should not exceed more than two pages since we are applying as freshers.

For engineering students, there will be primarily two types of interviews conducted by most companies – Technical and HR interview.

Technical Interview: In a technical interview, you will be asked technical questions related to your branch. You should have a good grip over core subjects to ace the round. I have appeared in interviews for IT companies only, so the recommended questions below will be relevant to students from the IT branch in particular. 

While preparing for the placement drive, you need to focus on questions such as

• What Is Object-Oriented Programming?
• What is Operator overloading?
• What is method overloading and method overriding? 
• What is DBMS?
• What are joins in SQL? 
• What are a linked list and its implementation?

These are just some of the frequently asked questions that you can face during your technical round. Now, let’s move forward to the next round, which is HR round.

HR Interview: In HR interview, your mentality and communication skills are tested. I will advise you to be honest and stay confident in the HR interview. They will judge you based on your communication skills as well as appearance. In this round, you should know how to smartly deal with the HR because if you don’t, the HR will take advantage of your weaknesses.

Secondly, you should always be informed about the company, what they deal in and when it was founded. These are a few basic points to leave a positive impact on the HR. There will be variations from case to case but you should stay confident and smart.

I joined the institute named Aptitude Baba in the month of January. Here, I prepared for aptitude and reasoning test. They used to give us daily assignments. For the technical round, I prepared by myself. I used to do competitive programming on Hacker Rank and solve problems on Geeks for Geeks. I also did separate preparation for group discussions and HR interview.

If you are serious about placements then join any institute for Aptitude and Reasoning as soon as possible. Take out some time regularly for technical subjects and give test series for various subjects. The more you practice, the more will be your chances of cracking technical and interview rounds. Polish your communication skills as well from the perspective of group discussion and personal interview rounds.

About the Author:

Akshay Sharma is an Electronics and Communication engineer who completed his education from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. He has been placed in TCS and SAP Labs India.