Summer Placements at B-Schools: The Stan 'dard' Operating Procedure

So we are approaching our summer placement process at IIM Bangalore. These days are hectic. Apart from assignments, quizzes, projects and classes we have to prepare for the interviews too. And we have less than 20 days from now on. 

We have at least 4-5 companies coming in every day and talking about the summer opportunities that they offer. I make sure that I attend at least one interesting company everyday. These presentations last at least 2 hours each and therefore time constraints ensure that I cannot attend more than one in a day. Some companies act all nice and treat us with pizzas and other goodies (TAS gave us laptop sleeves!) but others seem to be constrained by the financial conditions.

What I wanted to write about were just a few observations. common across all the companies. Very few companies do something different or innovative when they are selling themselves to the students. Almost all of them follow a standard operating procedure and tell you about the same set of issues. And the most common ones present in all of them are

1) Presentations start with music, song and dance sequence about the company. Sometimes the visuals seem unrelated (the more professional ones avoid this) and the music is jarring (sometimes techno remixes). 

2) Almost every other company is apparently a fun to place to work at. Somehow, they just cannot avoid the temptation to show us their partying scenes and pictures.

3) Every company talks about how it does not treat summer interns as photocopying guys, but gives them live projects to work on. They treat these live projects very seriously. 

4) Usually three kinds of employees are shown to students

• A very senior manager (usually but not always) who is an alumni of the B-school and who has achieved much in life. He/She exudes a lot of gravitas
• A middle level/senior manager who has just completed an important assignment and is on her/his way to the top.
• A junior employee who left the B-school just a few years ago (or just last year) and is still very excited about life. He/She has just met the biggies and excitedly recounts some incidents to tell us that she/he is doing some important assignments.

5) Stipend questions are addressed last (or sometimes avoided). But anyway most of the students do not look at stipends to make the decisions. We look for company's reputation and the role.

6) Everybody is looking for leaders. Not for thinkers, innovators, ground breakers or avant-garde types. Everyone has the words 'thinker, thought leader (what ever that is supposed to mean), innovator' on slides but no one seems to love it. And the evidence of leadership is through a large number of positions of responsibility. I guess they should look at JNU or Allahabad University. They will find plenty of 'leaders' there.

7) They close with previous intern experiences. Some companies combine this with song and dance sequences (techno remixes again). We Indians cannot do without those. Sometimes it is apparent (by the shifting eyeballs) that the interns were reading from a teleprompter or card boards held behind the camera. And this is not limited to just previous interns. Sometimes senior company officials also read from a teleprompter (or something similar, the eyes again shift a lot). I wonder all the time, how is it possible that they cannot say few inspiring words all by themselves!

8) This one is quite irritating. Most of the talks take place in evenings, when the energy levels are at the lowest. So the company employees come in and shout out aloud 'good evening' (or some other version) and expect students to shout back similarly. But student's reaction usually reflects their low energy levels. So the employees go into a hyper mode and keep shouting their 'wishes' until they get the required noise level response from the batch. 

These are just few common observations. I am eagerly looking forward to summer placement process and preparing well for it. Hope that  I will land up something good.