The COVID pandemic had a massive impact on campus placements. Most students consider campus placement as a criterion while looking at colleges for higher studies. That’s the reason why universities and colleges with higher placement percentages are high on the preference list of students.
That said, landing the right job is not easy. Students tend to overlook critical criteria at campus placements. At SkillUp 2021, Anindita Das and Arpit Malhotra, Members PlaceCom, along with Kaushik Sarker, the Head – Corporate Relations at Praxis Business School, shared insights on how to pursue a data science career via campus placement.
How to ace data science campus recruitments
Kaushik highlighted a few open positions at Big Four consulting firms to explain how domain knowledge is critical for landing such jobs. “You will have to work in several domains; CPG, manufacturing, finance, retail, and you would report to the director,” said Kaushik.
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Kaushik also talked about how companies expect the candidates to have the ability to break down complex business problems to root issues.
The job postings underline the critical skills students and working professionals need to have. The skills include — critical thinking, problem-solving ability, coding skills, math & statistics skills, and business understanding.
“Critical thinking is one of the top-rated skills because it helps understand the logical connections between ideas. In fact, at Praxis, students are rewarded for their ability to think,” said Kaushik. “This can range from how we use analytics to solve the problem to the kind of data we have, and what can you do with this data? All of this is to test your clarity of thought, problem-solving capability and ability of critical reasoning.”
Kaushik believes mathematics, statistics and coding are the three important pillars of data science.
“There have been cases where companies have even asked students to write codes on a piece of paper during the interview,” said Kaushik.
Talking about the recruitment process, Anandita gave a tour on the flow: The preliminary round will have questions based primarily on:
- Quantitative analysis
- Logical reasoning
- Verbal questions
- Data interpretation.
The first round is usually followed by coding assignments and a technical interview round with domain-oriented questions. The final round is the HR round, where certain behavioural questions are asked to gauge if the candidate is a good cultural fit for the company.
For fresh college pass-outs, the highest offers received by Praxis students are from Citibank, IDFC First Bank, Mindtree, Bridgei2i, etc, ranging from 18.3 lakhs to 11 lakhs per annum. For professionals with 4+ years of experience, the compensation was in the bracket of 22.5 lakhs to 17.2 lakhs. The offers came from companies such as L&T Financial Services ICICI Bank, EY, PepsiCo, etc, Anandita pointed out.
To ace campus interviews, students should find the right platform to provide them with comprehensive guidance and understanding of each data science topic right from the basics. “There are a plethora of options for taking up courses online, but just a fair bit of research into the course contents is critical before choosing,” said Anindita. Moreover, it’s also important to know the fundamentals of machine learning and statistics.
Wrapping up
With 23+ graduating batches, Praxis is an edtech platform with a decade of experience teaching data science. It is one of the pioneering institutes to start a full-time course in data science. The courses offered by the platform not only are immersive but also provide a full-time on-campus learning experience.
“Praxis has a unique line of faculty members consisting of academicians and industry experts who inculcate just the right amount of theoretical and industrial knowledge,” said Arpit. “Praxis also has a very structured campus placement mechanism, ensuring 90% plus placements in every graduating match.”
