We had our “day zero” on Friday. As I had told you before, I had interviews scheduled with four big consulting firms. Had a total of fourteen interviews on the day, including 11 “case interviews”.
Must say that I did pretty well in at least 9 of my 11 cases. However, I slightly goofed up when it came to “personal questions”. All of them asked me exactly the same questions and I turned in almost exactly the same (practised) answers. Stuff like my weaknesses, people i look up to, what significant stuff I’ve done, what makes me happy, what makes me sad and similar kind of stuff.
One question, however, with which three consultants stumped me was “Given you JEE rank it seems like your CGPA is very low.” Had a tough time defending that. Once again, I have the same answer everywhere but didn’t seem to have much impact. Guess I’ll have to live with this fact for the rest of my life. I haven’t quite lived up to expectations.
Coming to other things, the papers are awash with news today that 65 people from IIMB have got “day zero” offers. They talk about daddu who set the record for the highest salary for an IIM grad. They also mention the names of all the day zero recruiters and AT Kearney finds a little bit of space there. On account of this news item, there have been quite a few incoming calls today, both to home and on my cellphone.
My mind goes back six years, to the day when we had our “graduation ceremony” at National Public School. Our principal had then said, “now that you people are leaving school, you’ll cease to be a name. you’re just going to be a number. a statistic”. Can’t disagree with that one! I don’t matter. I’m just one of the 65 who got placed on a particular day in IIMB.