Placements & Email-ids and other college humour

The most interesting thing to happen during my college time was the Placement tests. Little known companies (um..I remember i-Soft from my college days), dream companies (many consider Infy their dream company to work in) & 'Get-outta-here!' type of companies (Google falls here) were the subject of many a discussion among aspirants. The serious types used to ponder over sample papers & "study" for placement exams.

And then, there was us. By 'us', I mean, the ones who believed acing an exam involved being prepared for it & using 'studying' as one of the tools rather than poring through 100 pages of puzzles over and over again. I used to belong to a niche group of people who used to hop placement tests just to enjoy the canteen food, while taking the test in a happy go-lucky sort of way. "We will surely get a job once we finish college" was a motto we swore by. "We're intelligent enough to get a job 'somewhere'!!" was another tagline. Tests, group discussions & personal interviews were 'fun'. I actually remember sitting through a technical interview for a company who wanted me to "list out all the Computer Science subjects you have studied in the last 2 years". The focus was on my memory "of" the subject rather than "about" the subject. I should have taken my syllabi, I wondered.

One of the other incidents I remember was the group discussions. One of them was so dastardly organized where the 'discussion' was nothing but a showcase of your extempore skills in 2 minutes. There was no room for discussing anything, just a speech for 2 mins, and you're judged on that. What made things worse were topics like "India 2020" or "Culture in the 21st century". While the topics maybe good for discussion, what exactly is an IT company gaining when they actually spend time recruiting socially aware aspirants? Now, don't get me wrong. I understand communication skills & people skills are very important. The process doesn't guarentee results, the person who judges these discussions determines who is fit enough. When such a process is so people dependent on producing results, why have it as a process in the first place?

Now that the serious stuff is out of the way, I wanted to recount a funny thing that happened. One of the guys filled up an application form for appearing in a placement test of an MNC. The placement co-ordinator called him & said "What is this email id? Can't you get a professional one?". The email id in question was "im2sxy4u". Another gem was "beachboy2000". Even wackier was "name_inrehab". I remember a girl who had an id like "handsoffme_name". I'm sure many applicant email-ids will reflect this trend. One of the side-effects of the "ME!" generation I guess.