The answer below would be useful primarily for CS students.
I was lucky to avoid the stress of placements given that I had a return offer from Rubrik (the startup where I interned). However, based on the interactions with my friends and cracking 5 off-campus job offers myself, here are some points that I’d like to talk about.
- Maintain a decent CPI. A lot of companies that visit IITs for placements restrict the CPI cutoff to 8.5. I would suggest that you should ideally try and keep yourself above 9.0 to be on the safest side. A few companies like Tower Research have even higher cutoffs (9.3 or so).
- Create an error-free resume. Make sure that your resume is neat and clean, well-formatted and it doesn’t have typos/spelling mistakes. Clearly highlight all your projects, skills and most importantly, your internship experience. Talk about the things on which you’ve worked. In CS, the non-core skills are mostly ignored. No one really cares about you being a basketball player or a dancer. All that the companies care about is your coding skills.
- Focus a lot on Data Structures and Algorithms. I cannot emphasize more on this. You may be excellent at Machine Learning, but you may lose great opportunities because you couldn’t clear the coding round of that company you were dreaming for. To filter out not-so-good candidates,