Lets have a look at the 5 most important factors that can hinder your summers placements, cause heartaches and heartburn during the slot 0 and slot 1, and ultimately make you so desparate that you will be craving for some companies whose names you have never even heard of, or probably skipped the same companies during your undergrad days. Let's start, shall we ?
1> Work experience of anything over 40 months
You are a goner, plain and simple. Unless you held at least 3-4 "Positions of Responsibilities"( a 3-word-term which is the most important thing to your "CV Points") in the past, you can forget about getting any decent shortlist. You may be extremely lucky if you manage 1 or 2, but rest assured you will be axed during the GDs or PIs. Don't have any hope of getting good companies during summers, because they absolutely despise work-ex.
2> Unknown undergraduate college
Pretty much disaster in the making. May be your college is one of the best in your region, maybe it has pretty strict academic regime, but it counts for zilch. IITs will dominate and the NITs will follow, alongside the DU colleges and BITS. I will go as far as to say that college brand pretty much makes or breaks your candidature.
3> Unknown college + bad marks (read anything less than 8.0 cgpa)
Now this is the worst scenerio. Your college was good, and strict, so you got less marks than some of the people who went to some other lower rung colleges under the same university.You were happy and proud during your undergrad days about the reputation that your college enjoyed locally. But once you are thrown into the pool with the big fishes (IITs, NITs etc.), all these regional colleges become unknown to the recruiters, and the only way to differentiate is the marks on your CV. Now you will be the biggest loser with a college name that is not known nationally, compounded with a relatively low score. A perfect recipe for disaster.
4> Acads
Acads are important, plain and simple. You may have argued millions of times about the unfair shortlisting criteria of the IIMs for giving weightage on past acads. You have reasoned that managers don't need marks obtained in school to excel in future. You may be right, you may be wrong. But you won't get shortlists with all the logic in the world. Your past will keep on haunting you, and just when you thought that you have finally shed this monkey off your back, it will come back again during the summers.
5> Male engineers working in IT firms (plus point number 1)
The summers process will pass peacefully for you, for the very simple reason that you won't be called for any interview for the first 2 days. You will roam around here and there, ask others how it went for them, and come back to your room again and start blogging about it. The companies look for diversity, which means non-engineers and the fairer sex. You will curse the day when you cracked the engineering entrance test and wish you failed that and went to do some course in psychology. From there you will start cursing the day when you first joined the IT company with dreams of onsite. IT has become a taboo and anything apart from that is a plus point, anything non-IT is diversity.
So that's it folks! I am sure you have heard it all before joining a b-school, and yet harbor a small glimmer of hope that maybe these stories are over hyped, maybe the scenario is not this bad, because after all you will be joining one of the top 10 colleges in the country. I sincerely hope that you will prove this theory wrong, but until that, don't expect anything grand and keep in mind, a 2-month internship process cannot and should not shape your life.Sour grapes? Maybe, but one needs some consolation, right ?
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