Why PPTs are important to attend

The resume and the interview process form a very integral part of the corporate recruitment process. No wonder, then, that you'll find every Harry and his kin writing books on self-improvement, developing communication skills, resume-writing and even interview-dressing. End of the day, it is about marketing yourself. Ofcourse, some may debate that it is about selling yourself. I believe marketing would be more apt.

The best form of learning is hands-on. Is that not why they say you need to have industry exposure before you do an MBA? In case of a resume-submission process, there might not be much room for error but there definitely are opportunities to learn from your immediate surroundings on how best to market yourself and how best not to.

Take, for example, the Pre-Placement Talks (PPTs) that are currently happening on campus. The idea is that each company will speak to final-year students and market themselves with the objective of luring students to join them. It's an exercise to impress (of which, another form is the recruitment process of resume-GD-interview).

The students read about the company and it's karma on their website and if the company is particular good or particularly bad, they read about it in the newspapers as well. So, when a company comes on campus to talk to the students, they have an hour or two to impress the panel - which in this case, consists of the students. The standard trick is to get a few recent graduates and ask them to talk about the company, get a hot-ish HR chick to run through the "what we are looking for" slide and get a couple of guys, who can talk. And talk in a manner that can save their lives if it comes to that.

And when you sit through these presentations every other day, bartering a considerable amount of sleep, it is hard not to make a mental note of best practices and worst practices, which is why I love attending these PPTs.

A few things that a company just MUZN'T do are:

• Paraphrase the sentence "We are the most awesome company in the world and we kick ass!" and repeat it every other minute. The rationale is: If you are so awesome, it is likely that we know it and anyway, saying it a trillion times doesn't make you more awesome, it just gets onto the nerves of people. [Resume tip to self: Do not SAY you are confident, smart and a team-worker; SHOW it through activities]
• Open the presentation with a guy who has no clue of how to keep an audience engaged. And worse, one who reads out his slides and carries a heavy Indian accent. It is like GMAT or GRE, your "level" is determined by the first few questions you answer and then it gets progressively difficult if you do well. [Resume tip to self: Highlight your best on the front page. By the time the resume-reader reaches second page, he would have already decided]
• Start at 5.30 PM and go on till 8.00 PM. What's that statistic about attention-span of human beings - 20 minutes at the most or the like. So, two and a half hours is 8 times of that! We hardly manage to pull through our 50-minute classes, how are we expected to sit through for over two hours and not loathe the speaker(s). [Resume tip to self: Keep the resume short and sweet. If you don't have anything to say, then don't.]

On a somewhat unconnected note, it reminds me of a quote by the marketing guru, Seth Godin "You can't fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience".

The 9th Sem and the protests

It's been quite a while since the last update. It is possibly because of the "9th semester syndrome."

Perhaps, it is that time of life when you reimburse your time and energy spent in the IIT system. Those who think IIT is a "necessarily evil between JEE and GRE" have started being nice to their profs to ensure a couple more adjectives in their reco letters. While the ones who use their IIT-degree as an envelope to mail their cover letter in to a company have started reading The Economist and the Economic Times. Then there is the parallel race for the IIT-IIM tag which involves sitting in a classroom and learning basics of grammar. There is also the segment which values the IIT degree at 15 crore during dowry negotiations who are beaming with a million-dollar-smile. Three million, to be precise. True or not - it makes for good blog content!

Lately, we have been in the news for reasons not particularly pleasant. Why'd you want to get up in the morning to the news of your teachers fasting in protest? On the other hand, it is pleasurable to wake up to news of mass-casual-leave protests. It is not often that your professor mails you saying "tomorrow's class stands cancelled" and wears a black band as a mark of protest. As a sidenote, the day the 9-to-9 fasting was held, the running joke in the insti was: "Aaj main apne do profs se milne gaya, dono ne bola ki lunch ke liye jaa rahe hain, baad mein aao.. ha ha".

The protesters argue that without quality pay, it is difficult to attract quality talent that is crucial for the IITs to sustain their edge. I find it a rather hollow argument because academia will never be able to match the salaries of the corporate world. Clearly, non-monetary incentives are what are needed.

A start would be to attract quality masters and doctorate students. It doesn't give me much hope when I see a PhD student googling for "how to find centre of mass of a thin plate" or when a faculty member tells me, what translates to: "In India, if you have a masters and you can write well, you are God". So, Mr. Sibal and the faculty association might want to try and address more fundamental issues than pay-hike. The faculty is also involved a plethora of consultancy projects, which from whatever little I know about consultancy, should be paying them in multiples of their salary.

Somehow, the administration (be it at the national level or the institute level) always tries to get rid of the syptoms than the disease itself. Why? Because it is far more easier: It is easier for the institute to kick people out of hostels for "ragging" than make a conscious effort to talk to the senior students, year after year. Because it is easier for the institute to increase minimum attendance requirement to 85% (which I must tell you is ridiculous and almost statistically impossible to adhere to - definitely not in the final year) than make the whole teaching experience in class better by investing in faculty training. Because it is easier to blame the poor communication skills of students than introducing compulsory "pesonality development" courses in the curriculum. Because, the administration has no freaking clue of what to do when the water reaches their nose.

What we really is need is a bunch of dedicated staff who can disentangle the threads and repair the system, which reminds me of the McKinsey partner who (in the pre-placement talk) said that they are working with IITB to improve the management of the institution. THAT is a good start. Late, yet, good.