Students’ Speak: Major topics for Group Discussion and excerpts from a Personal Interview

By: Akshay Sharma

Campus Placements are important for every student. Every student wants to clear Group Discussion and Personal Interview in the first attempt. For this, one needs to practice really hard and cover all the aspects to ensure firm control over things during GD and PI.

Group Discussion and Personal Interview are the most important rounds in on-campus placement in every college/university. In a group discussion, one topic will be given to a group of candidates and they are expected to give strong points to hold their side. This is a kind of elimination round in which most of the time only 4 to 5 candidates would move to the second round from a panel of 10-12 members.

In Personal Interview, the candidate has to give answers to all questions asked by the interviewer. They have to be very confident while answering and should have good communication skills to ace the interview.

Interview questions asked with detailed answers. Excerpts from my own interview are given below. I have given two interviews so far.

Technical Interview: In TCS Codevita

Interviewer: What is exception handling?

Me: When a program gets crashed, it could damage the files and computer. So, for this few lines of code are written in which if some error occurs it would handle the exception and will not let code crash.

Interviewer: What is inheritance?

Me: It is the feature of Object-Oriented Program. In which code is written once and can be used by another class.

Interviewer: What is socket programming?

Me: Socket programming is a type of programming in which sockets are used for conversation between two devices.

Interviewer: Write a program to find reverse of String?

Me: Wrote the code in C++

Interviewer: Write down any sorting algorithm?

Me: I explained bubble sort and wrote it with a few errors but corrected the same quickly.

Interviewer: Some questions on networking and database.

Me: Gave correct answers to most of the questions as I was thorough with the technical aspects.

HR Interview: In HR most of the questions are same.

Interviewer: Tell me something interesting about yourself?

Me: I am very passionate about trekking. I told them that I have done three famous treks of North India namely Triund Trek, Kraeri Lake and the Kheerganga Trek. I also wanted to complete all the famous treks.

Interviewer: What is your strength?

Me: I give my 100% to the work assigned to me and I love and enjoy my work.

Interviewer: What is your weakness?

Me: I concentrate on only one thing at a point.

Interviewer: Are you ready to relocate?

Me: Yes sir, I am ready to relocate.

Interviewer: How many members are there in your family?

Me: I shared all the details.

• Topics Covered during my Group Discussion: Generally, GD round includes topics related to Current Affairs or General Knowledge. But for me, it was not the same. Now, they can give you any random topics which are called Abstract Topics. The topics given to me during my group discussion were Black and White, Rainbow and GST. As I was aware with the type of topics they are asking nowadays, I prepared myself and covered both current affairs and abstract topics such as: GST, Statue of Unity, Demonetization, Banana, Rainbow, Snow, Oval Shape, Earth and many more. So, try to cover all the types of topics and not just concentrate on current affairs and general knowledge.
• Personal Interview: In campus placement, I prepared for HR and Technical Personal Interview. For HR Interview, I prepared all the basic questions like strength, weakness and interest. For the technical interview, I prepared all the technical subjects like C, C++, Java, Data Structures, Database Management and Digital Electronics. Again, it depends on your streams. For e.g. If you are an MBA student, your technical PI questions would be completely different from an Engineering student. So, focus on the topics related to your stream.

About the Author:

Akshay Sharma is an Electronics and Communication Engineer who completed his education from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. He has worked with TCS and SAP Labs India.