Placement through Hackathons and Competitions

A session on how to get placed through hackathons and competitions was conducted by the TPO in collaboration with the Consulting Club to help the students get an idea on how helpful can these competitions be when it is time for placements. The introduction was given by the assigned PO, Vivek Mandal, and the event was hosted beautifully by Tanya Anupam.

First up was Anshu Aviral who is currently a software developer in amazon. He mentored us on how to get an internship in Google Summer Of Code, Google, by talking about his experiences of GSOC 2015. He had the opportunity to work on the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) by developing the simulation which decides the path of the free proton. He also published a paper on the same.

Next, we had a mentoring session with Akash Junnarkar, who was the first runner-up in the KPMG ideation challenge, in May 2021. His team took forward the idea of their seniors who could not follow the rules of the challenge but were liked by KPMG all the same. On top of giving us an overview of the competition, he gave us tips and tricks to secure an internship.

Harsh Agarwal, Global finalist of Siemens Energy Challenge, working as an associate branch manager at WorkIndia, had himself taken inspiration from Akash and told us about his journey towards becoming a finalist. The major takeaway from him was- to have the courage to participate first, ideas will inadvertently follow. He told us about the benefits of participating, the most prominent being networking. 

Jiten Sidhpura and Parshwa Shah gave details about their road to gaining an internship in JPMC through Code for Good. Their experience was a unique one not only since they were advised to wear formal attire to the interviews regarding the project made in the hackathon but also had a team made for them from students all over India. Their highlighted advice was to be prepared for any unwanted situation as well as learn new things.

The next mentoring session was done by Vaidehi Vatsaraj and Utkarsh Jain who were in the top 150 in the Global Coding Challenge by Credit Suisse. They were given 9 questions ranging from easy to difficult and three rounds of technical and HR interview rounds. Their experience taught us that no matter how intimidating these national and international challenges might look, each and every aspect is doable.

The informative session was concluded by Vivek Mandal himself along with Afaan Ansari and Divit Kalathil. Vivek and Divit were the winners of The Japanese Hackathon, KakushIn, conducted by Nomura while Afaan was the runner-up in November 2021. They made a fitness application using Android Studio from scratch using Android virtual device manager even though they had no prior knowledge about it. The major takeaways that they shared with us, other than the two MacBooks and internship opportunities, was it is never too late to begin learning.

– A report by Dhruvi Sheth