The first ever review of the Department Placement Core comes during unprecedented times and yet, Baladitya B seems to have navigated these troubled waters well. Before I go on to examine the proposals he had put forth while applying for the position, I’d like to note that, as of 15 May 2021, 10 students have been placed, with 11 offers being given in all during the past year.
Although the initiatives he had planned were for an offline placement season, once the All India Placement Committee gave the green light to go ahead with placements as per the usual schedule, the whole process shifted online. The time crunch caused by the delay in this announcement notwithstanding, Bala credits his team for having adapted efficiently to an online placement year.
One of the initiatives Bala had planned for the year was to conduct crash courses relevant to placement preparation by faculty, such as Business Statistics. Professor Subhash, who he had reached out to in the summer itself, was unexpectedly unavailable during October and this did not work out. However, in coordination with the Branch Councillor Varsha, a structure has been planned out that can be taken up by the new Placement Core and BC for the upcoming year. The idea is to have weekly classes, spaced out over a month, taken by several faculty members so as to accommodate everyone’s schedules.
A second initiative that was planned for the past year was to map alumni with students in the placement batch, based on fields of interest. The aim was to allow students to interact and get advice from people of similar interests and with experience in the field. In coordination with the Alumni Relations Team, this initiative was fairly successfully carried out. During the summer, the Placement team collects student details, including their field of interest and past experiences. Based on this information, alumni were scouted from the ART database. This was done in two phases: students who were interested in institute placements were mapped to alumni in August, and students who were focusing on department placements were mapped by September. Once feedback is collected from both alumni and the placement batch, the next team can make necessary changes to the process.
The third main initiative that was proposed was to conduct Case Preparation sessions, which was carried out fairly well. Two sessions were held by Anwesha Pathi in the odd semester. The first session was a more generic fundae session about Consulting, held in August. This session was quite useful in motivating students to apply for more roles as they had better clarity regarding the sector. A proper case session was held in September, where Anwesha solved around 3 cases with the students. Overall, this initiative worked out well. In addition, there was a proposal to bring in PrepLeaf to conduct another session, but since there were only four shortlisted students, this was not feasible.
Another initiative that wasn’t initially proposed was to create a department-specific bluebook. The Placement team pulled this off early on in their tenure, in June itself. It was put together using information from mails and through alumni. Surya (HS17) helped with the final design and editing aspects. Yet another initiative that made the placement process better was the team shifting from cold-mailing to using LinkedIn as the main platform to approach companies. This was an initiative that was on the back-burner during previous years, but was finally implemented in Bala’s tenure. Lastly, to adapt to the overall concerns of 2020, the team also actively looked for off-campus opportunities for the students.
By and large, the Placement Core for 2020-21 has done a good job, and Article 19 wishes the upcoming Placement team the best of luck for their tenure.
Article 19 