Hi Guys,
Placement season started and almost every newspaper has this headline
"IIT student gets Rs.70 lakh job offer from Facebook".
Placements started in CEG too with some high paying companies like Amazon, e-Bay, Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley..fighting to recruit students from my college. Some of my friends are happily distributing sweets saying that they got placed.
Wait..wait.. I am also a student of CEG. Why haven't I got placed yet..? Because none of these companies even consider me for an interview. Trying to find out the reason for my rejection, I found that my CGPA is 7.93 out of 10, which is 0.07 short of their 8.0 CGPA expectation.
Can 0.07 make a big difference..?
I would like to share an interesting incident with you all. During the last year placements, one boy (let us name him Ram, does name really matter here..?) who got 6.97 as his CGPA, which is 0.03 short of the 7.0 CGPA expectation from Microsoft at that time, got placed in Microsoft. I was curious to find out how he got placed. Ram submitted his resume stating his CGPA to be 7.5 and he cleared all the technical rounds and the personal interviews to get selected in Microsoft. Later, his placement director found that he attended the interview with a fake CGPA. He suggested Microsoft to cancel the offer made to Ram. Going one step further, he prevented him from attending any of the campus interviews further.
Do you think 0.03 made a big difference in his life..? Absolutely NO....!
He did not attend any campus interviews after that. He went for an off-campus interview for the same company Microsoft and got placed again. Next year he came to my college for recruitment and the same placement director welcomed him. wah..Hats off Ram..!
Let us come to the point. Most of us continue to place a premium on external indices. Most of us think that knowledge is synonymous with the marks a student obtains, which in many cases need not be. To be frank, by giving importance to only marks, we fail to nurture our genuine passions. We give
respect to anyone who has more number of digits in his salary. One sad point is, only when knowledge is tagged with some priz(c)e, we're giving attention to it. But, could salary bring you happiness if you don't have job satisfaction..? or could salary buy you some good friends..? I guess I need not answer these questions.One last thing. Hereafter, I won't make life's choices based on money. I'll start following my own passions. After all, marks are just some random numbers scribbled on your exam papers which may eventually end up in dustbin. Would you consider something that will end up in dustbin so important than your own passions..?
