Final year Placement Roadmap in India

Nowadays students tend to go more for off campus placements rather than on campus placements.

One of the main reasons is that the student quality decreases in on campus placements, and so as the starting salaries in the MNCs.  

Let's think that you are in almost your 7th semester and the placements have started. You haven't focused on web development or projects up to this point, and you only have one month until your interview. There is no use in working in development because you cannot learn and create projects in such a short span of time. Even you just binge courses and it'll be like copying code from someone on GitHub, to be honest cheating and you will be not be able answers from the projects. We will guide you through the roadmap. People tend to work a lot on DSA and ignore the projects and dev part. But in off campus placements the interviewers put a little more importance to your projects and skillsets. Due to this, a significant portion of students begin to panic in the final few days before the interviews and begin bingeing on everything, which may lead to further issues. 

The interview is mainly divided into three parts which are:

1)DSA

2)CS theory topics: OS, networking, DBMS, etc.

3)Dev: Android Dev, Frontend React Js, Backend Node Js, etc.

To do a decent job, you must strike a balance between all three, not just one. If there's a good engineering taking your interview, he/she would like to put up a lot of constraints Infront of you and would like to see how you react to them.

Data Structure and Algorithm: 

From DSA the first part that the interviewer is likely to question about is arrays and strings. You must be well-versed in this subject. Because the interviewer frequently poses challenging questions from this area, try to dig a little further and possess in-depth knowledge of it.

Sorting Algorithm is also an important topic, practice it. Try to practice all the algorithms for each sorting method with such ease that you can identify patterns easily .

One of the most important topics here is Dynamic Programming. Basically, in dynamic programming we are trading of CPU complexity for memory complexity. Questions of Optimization can come in this sector, where you'll have to apply DP to solve them. Try to memorize a few portions of this topic and not all of it. You need to learn how to solve the DP problems and not mug up all of it. 

Tree, graphs, heaps are also important topics but if the interview is at the 11th hour, don’t start this topic the previous night expecting questions from this part. Just focus on the parts you have already read. Peers tend to say this kind of things that have you solved this and have you solved that, have you solved segmented tree. To be honest these topics are not so common and it's not like you will just mug up this topic the previous night and it will come in your interview the next day, and you will crack it. Stop thinking that you live in a strawberry world.

Most important from this section: Array, string manipulation and DP are the most important topics here. Try to go through these parts as thoroughly as you can. If you have a solid foundation in this area, you will succeed in at least one of your ten interviews. By having a solid foundation in DP, Array, and Strings in earlier years, some people even managed to land jobs at Facebook. Not everyone will be as fortunate, but based on your interviewer and depending on the circumstances this is actually a very good area to perform well in the interview.

Coding Skills:

Some people face problems like while having strong fundamental knowledge and coding skills but still can't crack the company assessments. So, how do u mark yourself a good coder? If u can't crack a company interview test, then maybe your coding skills are not that strong, don't judge yourself by yourself. There's no end of being better in any field so don’t stop grinding. Practice as much as you can till you crack the assessments. 

Pressure situations are also a big factor. For example you are a great coder, all your codes run smoothly in codechef , given the circumstances that you are sitting comfortably on your sofa in an air conditioned room. However, if you are using Skype and an invigilator is watching every key you press and you are having trouble with your code, then things might not go as planned and you will need to put in more effort. Boost your confidence and be confident enough to solve any problem in any situation

You should practice codes so much that upon watching the questions you shall start writing the solution codes automatically. This will only happen if you have put sufficient hours behind coding and you have mastered this skill.

Computer Science Fundamentals Theory:

Another important part of the interview is CS Theory . There's a list of topics to cover in this sector which are as follows : 

• Topics from Operating Systems like , memory management , process management , threads and file systems. 
• DBMS : related to backend projects.
• Networking topics like IP address, Protocols, etc. You should have a good idea of these topics. 
• System design topics like caching , load balancing , OOP etc.

If you have a very short span of time, don’t go too deep into these topics because that will only entangle your mind during that time . But when you go from On campus placements to Off campus placements , the importance of Non DSA topics like Cs theory and Web Dev tend to increase a lot .

System design is the most crucial of all the previously listed aspects. The interviewer will pose conceptual inquiries. It doesn't matter if you are familiar with its operational components, such as load balancing or the implementation of a cache. Interviewers are increasingly asking theoretical questions from this section, and it's possible that not even he has ever used system designs to solve real-world problems.

The interviewers will truly listen to how much you can discuss the aforementioned subjects. Your chances of passing the interview enhance if you can speak extensively about the aforementioned subjects when the interviewers provide you with a seemingly random scenario.

OOPs is also an important part. It has become a trend that people start to mug up the 5 parts of OOPs like Interface, Classes, Polymorphism, Encapsulation and Abstraction and start thinking they have fully prepared OOPs. But in reality, there aren't any questions on these topics during the interview. In actuality there are actually a bit advanced questions in this sector. The interviewers ask design patterns like factory pattern, builder pattern and singleton and questions like what is deep copy? So go a little deep in this part.

Development and Projects :

Dev and projects maybe the most important part in your interviews but in reality, it dev projects are not the only thing the interview depends on. The interviewers ask you questions from dev only if they see that you have a good experience in it in your CV. Like learning it in 2nd year, making projects in 3rd year and launching projects in the end year. But if you have no knowledge in dev it doesn’t matters. If you have only 2-3 months left for your interview don’t waste it behind dev as learning a new skill in such a shirt span of time will only give rise to more problems. So, try to focus on other topics like DSA and CS theory.

It is impossible to improve dev skills in 2 months. You will not be able to crack an interview with your dev skill that you will get in such a short time. So focus on algorithms and codes so much that it becomes your strong point in the interview.

But if you have a good experience on dev , start hosting all the projects you have done till date. Start putting your projects in GitHub. Package them in such a way that you will be able to demonstrate them easily and fluently during the interview. If you are from Backend dev, you should know how to host a server in linux , you should have a good knowledge in load balancing and caching too. You should also learn topics like RDMS and DBMS, as interviewers ask many questions from this sector. Mainly they don’t check that whether your answer is to the point or not but they check whether you have an in depth knowledge in backend dev or not. You should have proper projects on this. You can also brush up DBMS topics that will also help here.

The most problematic part in the interview is when questions are asked from the languages. You should have a good knowledge of the libraries of the language you have worked with . If you have shown off your dev skills then you will be asked about the languages and you should answer in them correctly. This part is different from algorithm part as in algorithm part interviewer gives a question for 15 minutes and starts chilling but in dev part the interviewer will constantly watch you and ask questions which will increase the pressure in the interview.

Nothing is easy , if you have worked hard in DSA that doesn't means you will ignore Dev . Work hard on both sectors if you want to crack a good job. If you don’t get a job by your third year don’t lose hope. You will have one more year left. Try to level yourself up and upgrade yourself as most of the best jobs come in the 8th semester.