Hi everybody,
My GD/PI was on the 6th of April, 9 am at IIM Bangalore.
The GD was as expected a case. Ours was about the problems a personnel manager of a mill which has been making losses faces as he tries to enforce a VRS scheme on his employees. Overall, a very peaceful discussion with equitable distribution of talk-time between all the participants. There were actually 8 people in our group. One person unfortunately misread his interview letter and thought that it started at 10 (ouch)
. He showed up about half an hour late and had to get his GD/PI rescheduled. Other than that, the GD went rather well. Nobody knew much about the particular industry (cotton yarn related) and so the GD didn't really get into much depth, but decent points were brought up nevertheless.
I was first in the group to be interviewed (love it when that happens, no painful wait in the lobby outside
) . There were three gentlemen in the panel, one slightly younger person who looked in his twenties (will refer to him as young dude, YD from now), one technical fundu types in his early forties (TF) and one very nice gentleman in his early sixties (HR); totally HR types.
I went in and the first thing I see is that TF has the photocopy of my college transcript in front of him. "Doomed", I think..."Technical. Here goes A
". Anyways, he starts off by very politely asking me some database related question, which I equally politely reply to saying "I'm sorry, but I don't know". He gives me this little smile which reads something like "Oh no, not another engineer who spent too much time freaking out and too little time studying in college". I smile back with something that reads "Oh yes, yet another engineer who spent too much....". Anyways, he then goes onto asking questions about AI after I tell him that that was my favourite subject, and we have a discussion about what constitutes intelligence, what constitutes real intelligence, what constitutes artificial intelligence etc etc. We then talked about MinMax (I've worked on game dev for some time, so that brought this up) and I explained MinMax to him on a sheet of paper. YD chipped in with a question about game theory which I answered (don't know if I was right though).
HR was flipping through my certs all the while and once TF was done, took over. This was the most enjoyable part of the interview. He started a discussion about my life in Saudi Arabia (I had studied upto my Xth there). Asked about the advantages and disadvantages of studying there, about influences during my formative years etc. This discussion went on for quite some time, almost 10 minutes. Overall, it was a lot of fun.
At this point, HR and TF look at each other and then at me and say "Thank you." I'm about to get up when YD sheepishly requests the other guys to let him ask a few questions too. We're all smiles now and then YD asks me probably the best questions of the day. In his own words, "You see and hear a lot about India Shining these days...tell me what in your opinion are the 2 things in the last 55 years that make you the most proud to be an Indian, and tell me 2 such events in the last 5 years". I had to think quite a bit before I answered here. Finally answered. They gave me the standard cookie-toffee-coffee combination. And that was that
.
All in all, I felt that my GD/PI was decent. Nothing running-down-the-halls-naked-yelling-Eureka super fantastic, but definitely decent. Rating of personal performance would be something like 7 out of 10.
However, I was muchos impressed by the entire process. To me, everything about it...the way it was organized, the way the panelists behaved, the innate confidence they exuded; showed the class of this institute. The interview was a quality one. They tested technical knowledge, self-awareness and thought process. At the end of it, I was very happy to have gone through this process. Irrespective of which way the results go, I'm happy to have been part of it.
Regards,
Mansur
asked me abt soem ragas in hindustani...told them ive learnt carnatic....then asked me wot kind of music??? whether i give performances......
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