How to prepare for placements quickly
My name is Sharan and I am an M.Tech CSE student at IIT Hyderabad. I am more into research into DeepLearning in NLP and my focus was never fully on placements. So I started preparation quite late (around July) with technical rounds starting in October and had only 3 days a week to spare for placement prep. This is for people in similar situations who do not have much time and might need a more streamlined and effective plan to cover as much in less time. :)
- A Strong Resume
- Ignore the “CV must only be 1-page” rule that everyone talks about. If you have good projects always feel free to include them but make sure to not include projects that are too trivial.
- Use the STAR or ‘Situation, Task, Activity, Result’ for each point and also mention the timeline and name of your guide for the project. This gives the project credibility.
- Practice talking about your CVs using mock interviews with friends. A high GPA and good projects are sometimes enough to get the job.
2. Data Structures and Algorithms
- Use only one platform (either LeetCode or InterviewBit) and make the most of its features. There is no need to practice on CodeChef/CodeForces/GFG.
- I used LeetCode and recommend using it as the discussion forums are very useful to learn new approaches. The below points are specific to LeetCode users.
- Follow the 3:6:1 rule for Easy:Medium:Hard problems. 150: 300:50 is perfect if you have 3 months of time to practice.
- While starting with easy problems, do them topic-wise and not randomly. Use curated lists of most frequent and important questions only. The ideal place to start is here: https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-easy/. You can find more LeetCode lists specially curated to cover the most essential concepts on Google. Doing a few good-quality problems are better than doing many irrelevant ones.
- After you cover about 50:100:10 of the most essential questions, make good use of the filters in LeetCode. You can sort by topic and frequency to ensure you do only quality problems.
3. CS Theory (OOPs, OS, Networks, DBMS)
- OOPS: is the most important and is asked the most throughout. GFG covers everything nicely and is perfect to learn OOPs quickly. Googling Top OOPs Interview Questions will also give the best articles.
- OS, Networks, DBMS: you can revise this from your GATE notes. Again, googling “Top Interview questions for X topic” will give you great articles to read from and they usually cover everything an interview might ask. It's very rare they get into more than the very basics of each subject.
4. SQL
https://www.sqltutorial.org/ is hands-down the best place to learn SQL quickly and effectively.
5. System Design
Nothing is better than https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview for System Design. They only ask this during interviews for a few companies, but it should take only 1–2 days to cover. You can get the entire PDF for free on Github. The Elevator System Design Question on YouTube should also be covered.
6. DSA Interviews
You can practice on preamp/LC/IB but even if you don’t have time, just make sure you always communicate with the interviewer and vocalize your ideas, even if you initially don’t know the optimal approach. For me, it always helped to quickly explain the BruteForce approach even if I knew the optimized version. This gives the impression that you thought of the optimal approach yourself and did not mug it up from earlier.
7. Networking with People
This is the most crucial part about placements which gives people a hidden advantage and often is the make or break factor. This is something that helped me the most and often people disregard how important it is to get as much information as possible for everything. Stay in the loop and keep your head and ears out there for “forbidden knowledge” that is constantly circulating among people. Very often questions repeat and you can prepare in advance for a test or an interview. It's not very hard to determine what questions are going to be asked as patterns always repeat.
- Discuss with friends about their progress and approaches for preparation.
- Asking seniors for advice, their interview experience, what questions were asked in their companies.
- Discord groups, Inter IIT NIT docs, Friends from other IITs, and NITs sitting for placements.
Thank you to all the friends, seniors, online articles, and people who helped me! I hope this helps :)
