Ok puys, I know this comes really really late, and may be irrelevant, but I will still post it because I wrote it ;)

Had my GD/PI in Churchgate, 2 Mar, 2 PM

Std X = 89.0%
Std XII = 86.4%
B.Tech (CSE, IITD) = 9.2/10

Work-Ex = 19 months (Lehman Brothers/Nomura)

CAT
DI 99.79
Quant 99.77
Verbal 99.00
Aggregate 99.97

Any other special thing abt u:
Decent extra currics,
I stammer while speaking; which gets more pronounced in a GD-type pressured scenario

Panel : Ms. Rajalaxmi Kamath (Public Policy) (RK), Ms. Rajluxmi V Murthy (Quantitative Methods and Information Systems) (RM)

Essay/GD
Topic: A case about what should be the criterea for deciding Padma award winners. Referred to the Olympic boxers being ignored and controversial cricketers winning it etc etc
Number of Ppl present - 7

Given 10 mins to think, 20 mins to discuss, and then 15 min to write summary

GD Snapshot - Peaceful GD, got a bit repetitive towards the end, conclusion was also not up to the mark

PI snapshot: 6th person to be called in.

RK - Pawan, by now you must be knowing what we are gonna ask you
Me - Oh, yes I talked to the people you interviewed before me and all said that it's mostly profile based

RK - So, what is special in your profile that we can talk about?
Me - Ummm.. Probably stammering, and Lehman

RK - It's Lehman, not stammering.
Me - Ok, actually I was asked about that in my Lucknow interview so..

RK - Ok, tell me what happened in Lehman. We have been hearing stories in the news, but you were at the heart of things. Give me a first hand experience
Me - blah blah, explained those 2 months (Sep,Oct 2008 ) in detail

RM - What do you think when should a company declare bankruptcy?
Me - When a company is not making profits, cannot meet its operating costs, and does not see anything changing in the forseeable future

RM - What if it doesn't?
Me - The debts will keep rising - no income, only expenditure. There are only so many assets that a company can liquidate.

RM - So under bankruptcy protection, does the company not have to pay the debt back?
Me - The assets get liquidated, and there is a preference order for payoffs

RM - Do company owners declare bankruptcy voluntarily?
Me - Most of the times they are forced by the scenario.

RM - Hmmm. Do the company owners have to pay back the debt with their own money?
Me - No, if it is a public company, they dont need to.

RM - So can they also take advantage of this protection? As in, by siphoning out funds from the company to their personal accounts?
Me - Yes, this is just what Enron guys did

RM - So should these guys not pay the money back to creditors after bankruptcy?
Me - If it is proven in the court of law that they misused the money, I believe there are laws in place to handle them..

RK - Ok, you talked about stammering, so tell us about that
Me - Blah blah. Told when it started, and how I have been coping up with it, and what I have been doing to improve my speech..

RM - You got a very good rank in JEE. Did you take coaching? 25 right?
Me - Yes, thanks ma'am, I took coaching in Chandigarh.

RM - You said in your essay that you worked in SPIC MACAY. What is it?
Me - It's Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music. It basically..

RM - (Cuts me short). What does ACAY stand for?
Me - Society for Promotion of Indian Classical Music And Culture Amongst Youth. This society organizes classical music concerts, lectures, seminars to help keep the classical music tradition alive amongst youth.

RM - So are you interested in classical music?
Me - Not really, ma'am. I attended 1-2 events, but did not enjoy them much. I was working more on the publicity and designing side. I used to like designing, so I designed some posters and visitors' passes for the Virasat festival that took place in IITD in 2004. I also helped in decoration during the events.

RM - That's good. So how did you land up into SPIC MACAY?
Me - I was looking to do something apart from my studies in the second year. I talked to this senior of mine who was a part of SPIC MACAY. I went to attend the meeting of the IITD chapter, and that's how I became a part of it.

RM - And what is this BRCA? You said you won some award..
Me - Yes ma'am, it is Board of Recreational and Creative Activities in IITD. I won the "Best Volunteer" award for my work in SPIC MACAY.

RM - You also did some web designing?
Me - Yes ma'am, I developed the Flash front-end of the Openhouse website in IITD.

RM - And what is this Saree modeling? Your major project right?
Me - Explained the whole B.Tech project. Some questions followed, answered them.

RM - So where will this be useful? Did you develop it into a full fledged product?
Me - This will be useful in the animation industry - blah blah. No ma'am, to develop it into a product we would have required more time and research. We documented our work and someone else can proceed easily from there.

RM, RK - Ok Pawan, it was nice talking to you. All the best.
Me - Thanks ma'am !

MISC - Very nice and soft spoken panel. But you do not get to know whether you are on the right lines or not. And with me, I have no idea what they tested

posting on your blog is nowhere against the rules.. but i think it is the norm of this thread not to have useless posts - if you know that people are not able to access your blog, why do you want to force them to?

it will be better to just paste the thing here and be done with it !

@unspoken
i think u have advertised ur blog enough.. do u mind pressing ctrl-c and ctrl-v?

Sorry for late post puys.. I was busy with work and I am now in NY.

Had my Essay/PI in IIFT Delhi, 5 Mar, 8:45 AM

Std X = 89.0%
Std XII = 86.4%
B.Tech (CSE, IITD) = 9.2/10

Work-Ex = 19 months (Lehman Brothers/Nomura)

CAT
DI 99.79
Quant 99.77
Verbal 99.00
Aggregate 99.97

Any other special thing abt u:
Decent extra currics,
I stammer while speaking; which gets more pronounced in a GD-type pressured scenario

Panel - P1, P2 (Dont remember the names).
P1 was a 30-something strict looking prof, and P2 was older and very calm.

P1 was the one who was handling the essay part.

Essay --
Topic - Pubs are Anti-Indian.

Only 10 minutes given - think, write in those 10 mins. I think I did a good job of the essay. I had not written even a single essay in my preparation days (just could not motivate myself to practise that - was confident of my writing skills). I wrote against the topic and I think I argued it out well.

Before the essay, we were asked to take out the photocopies of our certificates and put them on the table. That's when I realized that they required photocopies! I had totally missed that line in the call letter!! I told P1 that I dont have the photocopies. He said, "No problem, you can get them later. Oh, but you are the first one to be interviewed". I nodded. He was a bit frustrated and said "But you were asked to bring the photocopies!". I was quiet. He said, "Ok we will start with the second person and you have 20 mins to get your photocopies". I thanked him and quickly ran to get the photocopies after the essay. Quite an experience !

Interview --
P1 took the photocopies of my docs and started looking into my file.

P2 - So tell me what do you do in your work
Me - I am managing and developing a research framework that serves client and internal requests in real time.
(I had started stammering a bit by this time. Then P1 says "First of all, relax!". I said - "Yes sir, actually I have a bit of a stammering problem". He said "That's ok, continue").
I continued - quants can write services using my framework etc etc.

P2 - Who uses this? What for?
Me - This is mainly used by portfolio managers for pre trade and post trade analysis of their trades.

P2 - But there must be a system like this already in place - why are you developing it?
Me - Yes sir, there is. But we want to decrease dependence on IT team, reduce client support request turnaround, etc.

P2 - Hmm. What did you do in your final year project in IIT?
Me - Cloth modeling for virtual characters, blah, and more blah

P2 - Show me on paper how you modeled the cloth etc
Me - (started drawing a picture showing a piece of cloth and its mass particles)

P2 - How are these masses attached to each other?
Me - I was just coming to that sir. (drew springs that connect those mass particles together). Sir we used a mass-spring model to model the cloth. (gave some examples of the scenarios that we tested and how it performed).

P2 - Where will this be used?
Me - Sir this is used in animation movies. A lot of work has been done in the cloth modeling world, but that has been on the western costumes - skirt and top etc. We tried to model Indian ethnic costumes, especially the saree. (explained how we defined the profile and how the whole simulation ran).

P2 - So how exactly did you calculate the force on each particle?
Me - Sir we developed a collision model and used that to calculate the forces and then the accelerations.

P2 - Ok, let's take a simple situation. There is a person who jumps from an airplane with a parachute. Can you show me what determines the motion of the person?
Me - (He had drawn something on the paper while speaking and I continued it - I started drawing some forces and ..)

P2 - Don't draw, just tell me what you are thinking.
Me - Started telling the forces that will act on the person - gravity, tensions of the rope, and boyant force. Quickly added that the boyant force will be negligible.

P2 - Yes, it will obviously be - if I dont give the person a parachute, he will fall immediately.
Me - Exactly sir - for example on moon, there will not be any boyant force because there is no atmosphere

P2 - Right. Ok, tell me what does this tension arise from?
Me - (I started drawing a free body diagram of the parachute now. Started showing the boyant force on the parachute).

P2 - What will this boyant force be dependent on?
Me - (Thought for sometime). Sir I am not sure of the exact parameters that govern this force, but my guess is that it will be dependent on the viscosity of the air, the wind speed etc

P2 - Ok. But I want to know the exact acceleration of the person. Not in terms of tension etc.
Me - Sir if system is travelling with constant velocity, then tension will be equal to the boyant forces and hence we can calculate that.

P2 - Ok.

P2 looks at P1. By now P1 had finished looking at my file. His turn now. P1 opens the previous page of the pad I had been scribbling on, and shows me a graph. This was the usual initially-rising-and-then-constant graph with X and Y axes left unlabeled.

P1 - Have a look at this graph. Can you, from your daily life experiences/doings/Indian economy think of two variables X (independent) and Y(dependent) that follow this graph?
Me - (Thought for long, almost a minute. Then came up with an example.) If we have an automobile company, X can be the number of varieties of cars the company has launched, and Y can be number of customers per year of the company. Initially, when the company has just launched, its customers will probably increase with every new model it launches because that gives the customers new choices. After some time there will be saturation in the market so its number of customers per year will almost become constant..

P1 - So if I have to launch a car company, I am sure that I will get more and more customers as I increase my number of varieties?
Me - Sir it will also depend on the market - how much scope the market has, and how the economy is doing

P1 - But then this can go down with increasing varieties as well.
Me - Yes sir

P1 - Then your answer is not right. I want an answer that is independent of external factors and follows this path.
Me - Ok, (took some more time to think.). This can also be understood as the graph of economy of scale. When a factory starts producing...

P1 - (Cuts me short) So what is the X variable in that case
Me - (Started writing on the paper)

P1 - Dont write, just tell me
Me - Sir, X will be the volume of output, and Y will be the marginal cost attached to it.

P1 - So you mean marginal cost will increase in the beginning.
Me - (I got a bit confused here. I said something about fixed and variable costs but since I was not confident, I preferred not to pursue it further, and he decided the same ).

P1 - Ok, lets talk about computer science. I am a layman, I dont know anything about it. You have studied Computer Science and Engineering. Can you explain to me what exactly is the difference between "Computer Science" and "Computer Engineering"?
Me - (I had read on pagalguy that someone had been asked this question - but I never prepared for it :sad:, so my answer was ad-hoc) Sir, science has more to do with theory and algorithms, but engineering is the implementation part of it - when we have to deal with hardware issues, how an actual CPU will process it, etc etc

P1 - So you mean anything concerned with hardware is engineering?
Me - No sir, there is some science that goes into hardware as well...

P1 - (Decided to leave that in between). Ok, tell me where does the river Ganges originate?
Me - (Another very common IIMA question - thankfully, I had spent some time reading about Ganges the previous day :p). Sir, it originates in the Gangotri glacier.

P1 - Ok. (Seemed to me that he got the impression that I have heard/rehearsed this question. He asked me more to be sure of it). Which all cities does it pass?
Me - (Did not know many cities). Sir, I dont know the full path, I'll just trace its flow in my mind. It will pass through Hrishikesh, Allahabad, Varanasi - there are a lot of tributaties of Ganga in that region too. And then it flows through Jharkhand, Orissa, West Bengal and then finally into Bay of Bengal.

P1 - I was asking about towns, not states...(His voice gets lost and then P2 starts speaking)

P2 - Have you heard of trans fats?
(I was not sure I heard the term correctly, so confirmed once. It turned out that I had heard it correctly. But I was disappointed that I do not know about it)
Me - No sir, I have not heard of it :sad:

P1,P2 - Ok, no problem. That's it, you can leave. Good luck.
Me - Thank you sir.

I was aware of the candy culture of IIMA. And I had seen the bowl of candies (Alpenliebe and Eclairs) lying on the table. I was disappointed that I was not offered a candy :sad:

I got up and started to leave. As soon as I reached the door and was about to open it, I heard a call from P2 -
"Hey Pawan, you can take a candy from this bowl"
My eyes lit up with excitement. I promptly came to the table and grapped an Alpenliebe. Happy happy happy I was :p

I think it was all designed to see the candidate's ad-hoc thinking abilities. I thought I was not good at that, but I think I did fine. I am reasonably happy with my performance, but I think that there were moments when they were not convinced with my answers - I should have been more convincing in my words.

Anyway, I'm happy that I have my candy, and have my fingers crossed :p

A long one .. No blahs this time

Had my GD/PI in Dadar, 27 Feb, 10 AM, Panel 3.

Std X = 89.0%
Std XII = 86.4%
B.Tech (CSE, IITD) = 9.2/10

Work-Ex = 19 months (Lehman Brothers/Nomura)

CAT
DI 99.79
Quant 99.77
Verbal 99.00
Aggregate 99.97

Any other special thing abt u:
Decent extra currics,
I stammer while speaking; which gets more pronounced in a GD-type pressured scenario

Essay/GD
Topic: Necessity is the mother of all inventions
Number of Ppl present - 10/10

Given 20 mins to write an essay (word limit of 300).... GD started immediately after that...

GD Snapshot - Same as that given by kiran_shah

PI snapshot: 8th person to be called in.

I'm totally surprised by my interview. Lasted no longer than 5 mins, no
acads, no work ex. I dont know what to make of it !
Here it is -

P1 - Pawan, first thing I want to tell you - You have exceptionally good grades
Me - Thank you, sir

P1 - But, you stammer
Me - Yes sir, I do

P1 - That's totally fine, no problem with that. We have had many brilliant students in IIML who used to stammer. My question to you is that what are you doing about it?
Me - Consulted speech therapist, practice speaking, blah blah

P1 - Have you tried to identify the situations that you stammer in?
Me - Yes sir, blah blah

P1 - Ok. But I think we can also associate this with anxiety also?
Me - Yes sir, blah blah

P2 - But no need to feel bad about it, you did well in the GD - more than how you say it, what matters is what you say. So you were fine.
Me - Yes, thank you sir

P1 - Do you know the name of a very famous Greek - he used to stammer, and he put marble balls inside his mouth to improve his delivery of speech
Me - No sir, I am not aware of a Greek, but I know of Sir Winston Churchill - he used to stammer a lot and he overcame it.

P2 - Pawan, were you the topper in IITD?
Me - No sir!

P2 - Oh, what was the topper's CGPA?
Me - Sir 9.95

P2 - Who is he, what is his name, is he also trying for CAT?
Me - blah blah

P2 - Pawan, tell me what was the reason for Lehman's bankruptcy
Me - expected ques, blah blah

P2 - Ok. . You have done two courses - Macro-economics and Micro-economics. What is the difference between the two?
Me - blah blah

P2 - Ok, tell me what will be the impact of exports/imports of India on the general interest rate?
Me - Misunderstood it to be exchange rate, and said something

P2 - I asked about interest rate, not exchange rate. Ok now that we are talking about exchange rate, tell me clearly what will be the impact
Me - told something

P2 looks at P1 asking if he wants to ask anything. P1 disagrees.

P2 - Ok Pawan, thats it from our side.
Me - Ok, thank you sir

P1 - Pawan, how many calls do you have
Me - Sir, I have all the 7 calls.

P1 - Ok, Best wishes
Me - Thank you sir.

MISC - Very nice and soft spoken panel. But you do not get to know whether you are on the right lines or not. And with me, I have no idea what they tested :confused:

First day over and only one experience posted!!??

Puys, where are you all??

just found it online.. plz ignore the post..

Is it possible to know my GD/PI date online?
I have to fly to Delhi (I stay in Mumbai) for the interview and I have to book my tickets so it will be gr8 if i can check it right away without having to wait for the call letter by post..

any ideas?

Is it possible to know my GD/PI date online?
I have to fly to Delhi (I stay in Mumbai) for the interview and I have to book my tickets so it will be gr8 if i can check it right away without having to wait for the call letter by post..

any ideas?

Hi everyone..

My scores :
QA : 60,99.77
DI : 55,99.79
VA : 69,99.00
OA : 184,99.97

Calls : BLACKIS

Acads
10th :89.0
12th :86.4
Grad :9.2 CGPA (B.Tech CSE, IIT Delhi)
Extra Currics: Few positions of responsibility, nothing extra-ordinary

Workex : 18 months in Lehman Brothers (now Nomura)

Hi everyone..

My scores :
QA : 60,99.77
DI : 55,99.79
VA : 69,99.00
OA : 184,99.97

Calls : BLACKIS

Acads
10th :89.0
12th :86.4
Grad :9.2 CGPA (B.Tech CSE, IIT Delhi)
Extra Currics: Few positions of responsibility, nothing extra-ordinary

Workex : 18 months in Lehman Brothers (now Nomura)