Monday, October 20, 2008

Apps, Apps and more apps

The beginning of the new term augured well, We seemed to have some chilled out profs who didnt mind if we slept in class, we had a few fun teachers and I seemed to have kept my head above Sea level. But I should have known all this was too good to last.
I need to know exactly how much B.S can be tolerated for answers such as " Name one incident in your life where you had a significant paucity of time". This is not to forget the same age old questions: Name some academic achievements , name the most important incident of your life. But all said and done, I slowly achieved a Zen like state where I could write total B.S answers for arbit questions thrown at me in a dozen forms. This was to come and bite me back in the ass later during an interview.
My B. Tech degree finally came of integral importance to me. One of the companies actually cared about the branch we had attempted to study in college. I turned out to be the lucky opener for IIM Indore(much like the first warrior of the Greeks Protesilaus in the Trojan War.Legend has it the first warrior to set foot on the shores of Troy would be killed. Protesilaus bravely jumped on the shores and died soon) In a similiar fashion I was called, the sacrificial lamb itching towards slaughter. I was informed that the 1st lamb had quietly sneaked off in anticipation of murder and hence I was the chosen first sacrifice on the altar of the interviews. The interview went by like a blur except that one of them had immense pleasure in picking up each of my markseets and sniggering at my amazing marks. Whenever I said words like "determination"/ " hard work", he would cast a meaningful look at my resume and marksheets and snigger a bit more.
Later interviews were more on a common line. Y marketing? Y do u think we should take u? The answers to these I repeated and repeated till I grew bored. Funnily wat was scarier was not remembering what I had written on the forms. So half the time I would be thinking back to that night when I had filled out the form sleepily . I would wonder which incident I had put down and then probe the interviewer carefully to see his reaction. Quite a few times, I could see the interview perplexed. Promptly I would say another such instance... and so on.
One of the few take aways(in business terms) from this whole process has been my growing acceptance of a suit. Earlier I was extremely uncomfortable in suits and couldnt imagine wearing one for more than an hr. But thanx to this process, I now got used to wearing it for a whole day (with a tie to boot).

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