Trial by fire

I came to a B school to make money . As simple as that. People came in order to get more exposure , better job profiles and God knows what else, but me , I came for money.
I do not need to defend myself but still, when you work at a power plant with men temp. of 45 deg C , workers cursing everyone and u get a pittance for it , u gotta leave. One fine day , that is exactly what I did.
I was the fourth guy to get a summer placement , it was the second company in campus. The stipend was highest in history of DMS. The point here is , the earlier u get ur summers , the more you have to wait for ur final placements, or so our seniors told us.

14th December , IBM is first company on campus. I have not been shortlisted. I am not surprised , my cgpa is below par. Then the idiots come up with a second list which has my name.
As usual , they throw me out in the GD. I know a bit about ERP. In fact that is the only thing I know in IT. IBM is offering ERP profile. I coach shiraz and rohit coz they have been shortlisted.
Then I and tamal go for lunch , a very heavy lunch and I go to sleep. When i wake up, I find that shiraz and rohit are thru and I have been shortlisted for Citibank. Some relief.
Citibank interview : REJECTED. Well , after their PPT , where couple of our alumni were not able to describe what they did , I was a bit hesitant abt Citibank, but still it hurt.
What really hurt was that the bitch Krina got thru Citibank. I called nisha , she asked krish to cool me down. He came to my room and we calculated that lots of jobs were coming, so no need to worry.
I managed to clear Wipro GD ( a first for me ). I also chose not to appear for SBI interview (in hindsight one of my better decisions).
The next day , I cleared HCL GD and chose not to appear for kotak GD (again an excellent decision). But in HCL interview I got screwed. HCL picked up 6 ppl about whom the whole class was worried, defaulters of first order ( and some of them my best friends). Aryan cried in nisha’s car , I barely managed not to.
After that I worked hard to find out what was wrong. Qambar and shiraz helped me a lot. They walked me thru mock interviews , pointing numerous mistakes I made. I owe a lot to these ppl , especially qambar.
Infy PPT. All thru the year I had studied ERP coz tht was the profile infy had offered to our seniors. For our batch they offered testing and telecom. I had exactly zero knowledge about both of these.
Had you asked anyone in class where I wanted to go , the answer would have been Infosys. But it was not to be. Last hope shattered.
Wipro was the only good chance I had remaining. I had never felt so down in my life ( later on I would , but tht is another story)
Dday , first interview was Wipro. I came out of DHL GD , and rohit told me that Wipro ppl were calling for me.
I ran up 4 flights of stairs to 6th floor. I walked into the room and said “sir , I have just run up 4 flights of stairs , I need to catch my breath “
After that the interview was smooth. They asked me about my previous job , about the IT industry in general and SAP in particular. Since ERP was the only thing I had studied in 2 years, I snowed them.
They asked me to wait outside the room , then called me inside and said “Mangesh , we would like to make u an offer.”
That was it.
The stress was so much , I had a headache for the rest of the day , but I could not care less.
In the end I got ERP profile, the city I wanted (pune), all in all , life turned out to be okay.
I can laugh about it now , but back then , it was tough.
Now I can say , I MADE IT .