Preparing for Judgment Day
Akshay Saxena writes in with some advice on choosing your first job
It’s that time of the year again. Placement season, case studies, puzzles, new clothes, résumés and what not. It’s a time of extreme joy and pain for us IITians. After all, most of us look upon placements as judgement day. The one month in our four (or five) year academic life where companies weigh our achievements, talk to us for a few hours and designate our rightful place in the food chain.
With time, our fascination with getting an “A1 job” has only grown. We start to make planned tradeoffs between academics, organizational work and sports starting from our freshman years. Organizations get ranked based on how “successful” their alumni have been and clubs are formed (or joined) to inch closer to the perfect CV, the perfect interview and the perfect job.
In a nutshell, we turn placement season into the environment we’re the most comfortable with; a fight-to-the-death competition for the best job on campus. After all, the more others want something, the better it must be. As über-competitive Indians, that’s how we make most of our decisions.
It’s been three years since I went through the same phase and acted the exact same way (though at the time, I would have disagreed). I’ve since had several juniors ask me how to make these decisions, forcing me to think about this and talk to my peers and seniors in turn. The next few paragraphs are words of friendly advice, from a senior to a junior.
Know where you’re headed
Your first job will not define the rest of your life. It will however set the tone of your life for the next five to ten years. It’s a decision you must make carefully, more so than any decision you’ve made before.
It is important to have an overarching aspiration from your life. This aspiration could be as simple as “I want to be rich” or “I want to see my name in the papers”. It could be also be more specific. Such as “I want to be the CEO of a large multinational” or “I want to win the Nobel Prize in physics”. It doesn’t matter what this aspiration is. It is critical however that you think about what is most important to you.
While this is not an easy question to answer, the last thing you want though is to embark on a journey without knowing where the end might lie. Having this aspiration will help you put things in context through your first experiences as a professional. Think of it as the one deep breath you take before plunging headlong into the sea of confused hustle-bustle in the years ahead.
Know how you’ll get there
There are many ways to achieve your aspirations. There will be many paths you could take. While it isn’t possible to be clear of every step along the way, you can pick your first step carefully.
For instance, if you aspiration is to be a successful entrepreneur, you could do one of many things.
You could obviously start from scratch and build your own organization. You would of course need a business idea that could make it that big. If you already had one, and were confident of securing funding then entrepreneurship straight out of college would be one possible path.
If you didn’t have an idea, you could choose to go to school to work on an idea. You could go to grad school and work on developing a product, or go to business school. Your area of research at grad school and where you work before and after business school would be important. They would need to be geared towards finding a feasible business plan.
In both cases you will need to have the skills to make a successful pitch to a venture capitalist or an angel investor.
If you go through this process and assess your options carefully, you will find yourself rejecting jobs that while coveted don’t fit in with your aspirations. You will also find it a lot easier seeing value in your first job when you start work. You will know why you’re there and what you need to focus on. Drifting through life will not get you where you want to be.
The best way to find the information you need is to talk to people who’re already along the path you seek. The IITs don’t have adequate resources to help you do this. You will have to invest time and effort into talking to people across the industry and academia. You will be surprised at how many people your Faculty Advisors and professors can get you in touch with. Use your networks and be well informed.
Remember that companies on campus are trying to recruit you and their version of the truth is likely to be more than a little biased. While useful, attending 30 pre-placement talks is probably not the best way to make among the most important decisions of your life.
Be realistic but not pessimistic
IIT is among the toughest places to get recruited for the job of your choice. Especially off campus. Making a shortlist of 30 odd from a batch of over 500 IITians more often than not will stack the odds against you. It is important to be realistic about which options are accessible straight out of campus and to have a contingency plan.
It is equally important to steer clear of two very common traps. The first being the campus grape vine. Each year you will hear rumors of a hotlist for companies, of “stud” resumes and much sought-after candidates. Avoid these conversations. The best people to talk about your résumé are seniors in the companies of your choice. They will more often than not, be able to give you an objective point of view on your chances. Your batch mates are likely to be as ignorant as you.
The other is to believe that the only way to get into a line of work is to get the job of campus in the year you graduate. As I stated before, you are more likely to get an interview once you’ve left IIT than when you are on campus. I know several peers who’ve ended up working in jobs they weren’t short-listed for on campus after a year of work-experience elsewhere. Taking the IIM route is also an exceptional way to open doors.
With the economic downturn, recruiting will be slow this year. This makes it doubly important to have a contingency plan ready. Don’t jump into the first job you get just because you’re disappointed or frustrated with how placement season has gone for you. Ensure that you take up an opportunity that steers you towards the path to achieving your aspirations and not away from it.
In a career that is likely to span close to 30 years, a few years invested in getting to where you want to be are a great investment. Make this choice over jumping on the bandwagon.
Doing this will help in the short-term
The clearer you are about where you’re headed and why you’re making your career choice, the better you’ll do in interviews. Employers like enthusiasm and clarity in candidates. The long HR question lists (that I’m certain float around campus) are all geared towards understanding your thoughts on some of the issues I’ve touched.
All of you have the potential to achieve great things. It is important however to think about the journey ahead. I hope that this article starts some of you thinking. Use your networks well and talk to as many people as you can find. The better informed you are, the surer you will be on “Judgement Day”.
Akshay Saxena was editor of InsIghT in 2004-05. He is a Senior Associate with the Boston Consulting Group and is currently on secondment to the International Save the Children Alliance in London.