A batch of around a thousand students enter the quaint premises of IIT Roorkee every year with gleaming eyes, ready to live the IIT dream they toiled for 2-3 years. Though a melange of different ideas, cultures and personalities; each one of them slogged through the same system and remained confined to the monotony of JEE preparations. But this place opens multiple doors of opportunities that help them discover their unique skills while persevering to find a stable footing in a whirlwind of freedom.

After completing their degrees at IIT Roorkee, some students choose to go for higher studies, B-schools, civil services, startups, while others (83.55% this year) opt to sit for the placements. The placement season is often considered as the final assessment card of the 4-5 years spent at IIT Roorkee, appropriating ‘machauness’ to the ones with a big fat juicy paycheque. A secure first step towards professional lives, lucrative pay packages and a rigorous preparation process that brings out the best (or worst) of oneself are usually the reasons why students glorify placements throughout their stay at the campus.

The placement season is spread over two phases and in this analysis Watch Out has included the combined data till May 28, 2019.

Number Crunching

The first phase of placements starts from 1st Dec to 15th Dec wherein companies come to hire prospective employees in a continuous streak while the second phase starts in mid-Jan and continues till May with recruiters visiting the campus from time to time. The second phase is mainly for universities and coaching institutes and focuses on M.Tech and PhD students seeking for a place in academia.

The placement process for the first phase starts way back around September when companies fly down to give presentations, followed by resume shortlisting, written or online tests and finally the interviews, which commence from December 1. The anxiety is palpable, and one can almost feel it pulling at them in a giddy maelstrom of raging emotions. It is a harrowing time for the final year students at the campus. The TPO organises preparation tests and workshops in partnership with Career Launcher & pariksha.com. These workshops are week-long classes that give a general course on quantitative aptitude and provide tutorial sheets for practice. These are useful for students who are not very inclined towards specialised profiles and are also helpful is ascertaining their relative standing amongst their peers.

We dug into this year’s placement data* and curated the following statistics. Useful trends highlighting aspects of the placement process and patterns regarding the offers made in the Placement Season 2018-19 also form a part of this Placement Report.

Number of Eligible Students ( UG+PG+PhD) = 1788
Number of Students Registered = 1494
Number of PPOs = 120
Number of Offers made (Including PPOs) = 1090
Number of students accepting the offers (including PPOs) = 1005
Number of Companies that recruited = 318

This year, in total 1021 offers were made on campus across UG and PG including 120 PPOs secured by the students after their pre-final year internships. Like every year, the graphs are high peaking for circuital branches (EE, CSE, ECE) in terms of percentage placed as well as the pay packages. 93.52% of students were placed in the CSE Department and 88.85% in the ECE Department while the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department (72.58%) and Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department (78.53) also show impressive figures.

*The graphs are interactive. Kindly hover on the graph and click to see the tooltip and labels.

A total of 380 companies visited the campus for recruitments , of which 318 recruited.^[1]

[1] The data on Channel I also contains duplicates which makes the count 304 instead of 279. If we consider different profiles or a PPO offered by the same company as an individual count (For Eg: A single company , say Goldman Sachs, offering jobs as Data Analyst, Software Developer and a PPO is counted as 3) this figure then equals to 279. An additional 39 companies came for the Departmental Placements of the Department of Management Studies. The total number of unique companies (some of which give offers in multiple profiles) that recruited from the campus is 262.

We have tried to simplify the job profiles and roles as follows:

This year, IIT Roorkee witnessed 67 companies recruit in Software Development whereas for the students interested in Data Science (7 Companies) and Product Design and Management (8 Companies) were hiring. 68 companies recruited the Core enthusiasts this season while 47 companies offered Pre-Placement Offers. (Refer the pie chart for profile wise company distribution).

The next infographic gives an insight into the kinds of profile offered by the companies and indicates the popularity of Technical and Core profiles with less space for Data Sciences, Consult and Finance.

Bridging The Gap

The Placements 2018-19 fared well for the students with a total of 1005 students accepting the offers. The lack of diversity and variety of job profiles during placement season has been pointed out since long, TPO claims that as compared to last year, this time many new companies visited for Finance (8 companies), Quantitative Research and Analyst roles (3 companies), but still, the number of students placed in these profiles are very low (33 and 8 respectively). Google, JP Morgan, AQR Capital, Appdynamics, Sprinklr, Squarepoint Capital, Udaan and Fractal Analytics were a few top names that recruited for the first time from our campus.

The campus culture lets the students explore a wide range of career options and provide space to every individual to evolve in his own way. Apart from coding and software development, the enthusiasm for Finance, Consultancy, Operations, Data Science, Marketing, UX/UI Design, Product Management and Design profiles has increased significantly. But at the approach of the placement season, the lack of companies in the desired sector and proper profiles lead to a major disappointment (See the Profile-Wise Companies Distribution Graph and Profile-Wise Students Placed Graph).

On-campus placements definitely have an edge in comparison to off-campus placements due to a straightforward, transparent and simplified process. The tasks of emailing and approaching the company are done by the TPO and most of the major firms recruit through campus placements. But students interested in other profiles, due to lack of offers, choose to dive into the chaotic rigamarole of off-campus placements by a variety of methods, approaching their alumni networks or crawling through LinkedIn, to give an example. In these matters, the TPO needs to take concrete steps to accommodate the needs of the students. The TPO has the sole power and authority to approach the companies, talk to the HRs and negotiate the hiring date and offers. Big firms and reputed brands fight over earlier slots and provide fairly high enumeration only when given the slot of higher priority. This year, certain firms like Bain, Rivigo, Schlumberger, I3C, to name a few did not come for hiring even after taking the test and shortlisting the candidates. When given a lower priority, reputed firms either refuse from recruiting or reduce their pay packages. In the end, it is the student community that suffers.

With the establishment of specialised campus groups like Design Studio, Finance Club and Data Science Group, it is quite clear that the student community is striving to build a decadent culture in various fields. The TPO will have the full support of the student community in approaching reputed names in these fields and hence it’s prudent to make attempts at fostering better and healthier relations with companies that still give Roorkee a cold shoulder.

Indubitably, the placements are an important stepping stone for the next phase of a student’s life. Despite all the factors, one must also understand that the entire process is also has a degree of subjectivity. On D-Day, you could lose your nerve in front of the recruiter, or something on your resume might interest someone from the panel, or, you might have to miss out on an interview because your slots clash, or you might even get a chance to give a walk-in interview. If you look at the bigger picture, even though a job offer might seem like a metric to measure how successful your college life has been, it isn’t the only mark of your skills and abilities.

There are many things the junta needs to know about the workings of the TPO, like the workings of the current system and the problems students face during the raucous of placements and internships. Watch Out will address this need for information dissemination through an article on the TPO soon and we’ll also try to find possible resolutions to the issues that we faced due to lack of data for the coming years.

Until then, we hope this serves as a helpful reference for the next batch of students heading towards the placement season.