Campus Recruitment Fever

Come sixth semester and everyone is anxious about the campus selection. Finding a job through walk-in is really tough unless you are blessed with a brilliant brain and destiny. I was not sure if I had either of them. Thus, getting selected in the Campus Recruitment in my college was on top of my agenda.

I was fairly confident of making it to one of the many Software Companies that visited our campus. But being a Electronics student, software was never my field of interest. For 4 full years you study all the electronics and communication stuff, and finally you land up in a software company with only programming language known being C (and C++ if you chose it as an elective). This didn't really interest me. Still worse, once you land into a software company, you undergo training in such topics as JAVA, .NET etc which my computer science counterparts study in their engineering curriculum as part of their semester program. Hence, a Software job was just an option ( there are more worse things like not being employed after graduation).

During the course of 6th semester there were quite a few seminars, some of them on system on chip, VLSI etc. Resource persons talked about what was expected of freshers aspiring for a career in emdedded systems or VLSI. It induced some confidence in me. One such talk was by Mr. Vivek Powar, which really inspired me to look seriously into getting a job which was in my field of interest-VLSI or emdedded systems.

August 2, 2006- the day when recruitment was scheduled to begin in our college. The list of companies was long, most of them software. The problem was if got selected in a software company during the initial rounds of campus selection, I was out of the race because the Placement officer didnt allow selected students to appear for other companies' selection process. And Companies of my interest came quite late, after lots of software companies. In such a situation it was a great relief to see KarMic and Sankalp having their selection procss in the last week of july 2006; KarMic on July 23, 2006 and Sankalp on july 27, 2006.

Dillemma never seem to end. Earlier it was Hardware or Software. This time it was KarMic or Sankalp!
Couple of issues made me go with KarMic-
1. Its selection date was before Sankalp.
2. Sankalp had jus started operation and companies often have turbulent times in the initial phase. Meanwhile Karmic was 7 year old and much talked about in our department.
So there I was, on board a bus to Manipal on july 22, 2006, for interview to KarMic. It was the First company I was interview for. Would it be the last ( during engineering), I was not sure.