Clash of IIM’s

Two of the IIM’s vying for me to such an extent that they have scheduled interviews on the same day, same location and all. Indore gets a headstart of 1 hour starting from 8:30 AM.

Couldn’t these institutes get together and come up with a solution that will prevent these things. With the IIM’s declaring that they will go online from next year, couldn’t they use some of the IT infrastructure that would be coming into place to manage a small thing as this. And I am not alone. Very many people have got clashing schedules this year. I might be the only one who won’t try for a change. I might just get lucky and manage to attend both at the cost of one this way. The administration process as a whole is ridiculous but they get away with it because there are about 300,000 people trying to get into those institutes, or at least filling the forms every year. Can’t they have a common interview panel and a defined set of criteria to choose students. But I guess they dont have to try because the numbers are in their favor. Also the way they pick students, they are already picking those that will succeed. I mean if they hold the admission and convocation together, it won’t make much difference to either the people going in or the companies recruiting they. They just intend to give them a free and cozy place to stay for a couple of years so that they can extract their pound of flesh later. Or maybe they do add some value and the day I realize that will be the day I start preparing for the interviews in earnest.

Just saw their schedules today. See for youself.

Indore Interview schedule

Calcutta Interview schedule

IIM K : Form Answers

Describe briefly your current or most recent job responsibilities. State the knowledge and skills you have acquired from this experience.

I have worked as a web application developer for the last 2.5 years. Currently I am in the MnO team at Atos Origin. This position has enabled me to learn to respond fast, interact with clients and work on the whole product because we keep getting enhancements from all parts of the project and we are expected to deliver them quickly. I was able to get a complete understanding of the project very soon and that has enabled me to be productive as well has elevated me to a team lead role where in I guide other members of my team.

Why do you wish to go for a management career?

I was part of a startup and we failed to keep it going. That was where I started thinking about doing an MBA seriously. That experience showed me that you need a complete understanding of business side of things as well as a good grasp on technological aspects. So to build on to technical skills I have acquired during 2.5 years of my work in technical domain, I now want to do an MBA to get an understanding of the business aspects of the thing so that I can take up more responsible roles in any organization.

What alternative careers are you considering and why?

As I see MBA as a natural progression in my quest to get a better role in IT field, the alternative I have thought is continuing to work in my current role and in the meanwhile expanding my knowledge of technology as well as project management so that I could progress on to roles of more responsibility and importance. I would try to get in a development project as a team leader so that I could build my people skills as well.

Describe your strengths and weaknesses as identified by you.

I am able to delegate work efficiently and stay calm under pressure. This enables me to get more work done.

I am an introvert by nature and this has hindered me at times.

What is your most significant accomplishment so far?

I consider clearing IIT-JEE with a rank of 2354 and getting into IIT Kanpur my most significant achievement so far.
I have written this here in hopes that someone will provide comments to make them better or it will be useful for me for filling out the next set of forms.  I will also try to post answers to other questions and some follow up questions on this.

(Not so) failed telephonic interview

I had a telephonic interview on Monday for Mastiff. The interview was scheduled for 11:30 AM but by that time I was still on my way to office so I asked the person to call back in about half an hour. But before that I had to get Vivek’s mobile as I had succeeded in drenching my mobile on the visit to Koraigad and as is the wont of Motorola mobiles, it gave up on me. So the interviewer called soon after I reached the office and off went the interview.

He bombarded me with a lot of questions. Here are some I can remember :

My Experience ?
Work at previous companies ?

What is struts ?
Request flow details in struts ?
Which version am I using ?
Know about struts 2.0 ?

JSP ?
How to get request url ?
what are the implicit object available in JSP ?

What is Hibernate ?
What is ORM ?
Explain how hibernate is used ?

JDBC ?
Which version ?
How connection pooling is implemented ?
Query to get latest inserted primary key ?
Query to remove duplicate content ?
How to use stored procedure ?
Diff between prepared statement and statement ?
How do we use a statement ?
What is the return value ?
How to get column names and column data ?
getMetaData or getResultSetMetaData ?
column names as list or array list ?

I think that covers most of the questions that he asked in the interview. I gave answers to those I knew. Blabbered something about those I didn’t know. All in all, I thought I did pretty badly and I was almost sure that I won’t be listening from them but the HR Galdyus who had called earlier to set up the telephonic interview called back in the evening and informed me that I was through and that they wanted me to appear for a personal round of interviews sometime soon. Now I don’t know when I will be able to manage to ask my TL for a leave so that I can go to Mumbai to appear for an interview. They wanted this to be soon but I think I will ask for an Friday next week kind of thing.

Add to it the fact which Vivek talked about. How many things am I now trying to do ? Preparing for CAT ? Actively scouting for a Job and working in a job. I think all three cannot be managed effectively. But I think I need to keep doing all three because two of them are pretty imperative and the third one I need to do so that when time for a conversion to permanent position comes I can drive a good bargain or so I hope.

Damn I still have to make up my mind about when I want to give the interview and contact them.

Atos Origin Interview

I thought I would write down something about the Atos Origin Interview I had today or rather yesterday which was another stop for me in ongoing job search which has been going on for quite some time now. It feels long enough nowadays to start to feel embarrassing but probably I can pass the buck to the slowdown in IT industry all over and companies shying away from recruitments. Well, a little more should be attributed to my failure to make good of some of the early chances I had but thats a story for another day.

I got a call the day before from a Jupiter Recruitments for a contractual position with Atos Origin and like I do these days I promptly agreed. The first round was short and mostly sweet. I was quizzed about Java, Struts and JSP and for a change I was able to answer most of the questions to the interviewers satisfaction. Some of the questions which I am able to remember are like:

1. Tell me about yourself
2. Why software after a degree in chemistry
3. Details about the current project
4. How does Struts work
5. How do we use lookupdispatchaction
6. Difference between Vector and ArrayList, Set and List
7. Impact of isThreadSafe=”false” on jsp
8. Things about try, catch and finally and when would finally block not execute
9. Implicit Objects available in jsp page

I will add more questions if and when I do remember them but that was it mostly and viola I got through.
The next round was with the Manager and this was more of a general inquiry session rather than technical starting with tell about yourself, how do you rate yourself, some thing about being a quick learner as I said I was a quick learner, things which made me happy in my career, about willingness to work in Pune, what I knew about the company and lastly what were my salary expectations. I was then offered a chance to ask questions and I asked a couple about what my role will be if hired and why the position was contractual.

This last thing about expectations is something I have never been able to get to in my previous 5-6 interviews mainly because of my inability to clear the technical rounds so I guess this should make me happy. I was happy but now a lot depends upon when and how they get back to me. Right now I am in a position where I will accept any decent offer they make me.

So thats that then it seems.

And yes, this marks the first decent length blog I have written after a long time.

I intend to keep writing now on this website which is publicly available but mostly unknown. Right now I think I am the only person who knows about its existence and I think that will help me write a little frankly. I plan to take this public, at least make some friends aware of it so that I can have some comments, feedback and probably some content too. I also plan to write about how I got to the position I am in right now. Maybe that will help me have a laugh at my expense someday.

PS: I wrote this the next day of the interview but is published about a month later on this blog due to some unknown reasons.