Interview Tips and Placement Tips For Freshers

The most anticipated dream of every fresh graduate is to get into a job. An excellent first job will make way for a rewarding career. A systematic approach is needed to get you into your dream job. Here are some tips to stand out from the rest during interviews or campus placements.

Pre-preparative phase

Running around at the last moment in order to prepare for an interview is not a wise decision. You need to prepare well in advance. Start by making an impressive resume. Browse the net and go through a few outstanding resumes. Try to grab some knowledge on what makes those resumes outstanding. Make a clean layout of your resume. Keep away from colours and decorative fonts. Don’t use too many unnecessary words. Too much wordiness will spoil your resume quality. Chart out all your achievements, abilities and outstanding qualities. Highlight your curricular and extra curricular abilities in catchy words. For example, ‘Was the topper of my whole graduate class’, could be written as ‘Topped my class in graduate level’. Keep it an important point to add things about you that will make an interviewer to decide about you. When you write about the internships, trainings and projects that you have done, describe your contribution in it. Make it a point to write each and every point in one single sentence. As said earlier, cluttering words will render the quality of your resume bad. Throw light on the extracurricular activities where you have outranked. Initially make a rough draft. You can sharpen it further by making a reliable professional in your field like your lecturer or your Training and Placement Officer (TPO) to read it and make constructive changes in it. You can also make some more well wishers read and make suggestions to incorporate. If you some someone who is working in big corporate, don’t forget to ask their suggestions as well.

Keep in touch with your Training and Placement Officer. Collect information about the companies that are going to visit your college for campus interviews. Try to know more info on the role of these companies and their process of selection. Keep abreast of all the training and placement cell info.

Preparative phase

1. Prepare for the interview. Start by reading materials over the internet about interviews. You can make a collection of common questions asked at interviews and prepare answers for those.
2. Try and study about yourself. Recall incidents till now and reflect on them –the things that excited you the most, the happenings you felt good about, the events that made you unhappy, etc. This will give you a study on yourself. You need to know about yourself first, only then can you tell someone else about you.
3. List your strengths and weaknesses, long term and short term goals, skills, motivations, career interests, etc from interview point of view. This kind of listing will make you answer promptly when you are asked about your abilities, disabilities, etc. If you take time to answer when are questioned, your reliability will be doubted by the interviewer. So will be the case if you blurt out a badly constructed answer. When you give clear and quick answers to such questions, your good decision making ability will be revealed and you will be rewarded suitably.
4. Seek the help of your well placed senior friends who are your well wishers. Ask them if the answers that you have prepared for the list of questions are acceptable.
5. Prepare for written tests. The problem with some graduates is that they perform well in all other parts of the interview except the written test. So prepare well. Practice writing on a paper whatever you have read. This will help greatly in verbalising your knowledge and in managing your time. Doing well in the written test will greatly help you getting the job offer.
6. Get prior information on who is visiting your campus and get acquainted with the info of their company in terms of their business, man power, etc. Knowing the interviewing firm will also help you in determining the kind of questions that you will be asked. In case, you cannot make out on what would be asked, be well prepared on a few of your favourite subjects. Some firms would want to know how good your knowledge on your own favourite field is.
7. Practice group discussions with bright fellow students. You may collect some tips by browsing on how to perform well in GDs. Learn tactics so that you can insist your ideas firmly but without being aggressive. Also make it a point not to be too meekly while you put up your ideas. Practice makes perfection. So practice well to strike a perfect balance of the above said parameters.
8. Also, develop good knowledge of facts and know about recent happenings. Watching daily news, reading newspapers and magazines, etc will help you have a sound awareness of current happenings.
9. Collect more information about the company where you are going to attend the interview. When you have well furnished details of the company, and you say you want to work there, it reveals that you are really interested. Browse the net to know details of the company’s location, history, goals, changes, products or services, major news in the past few months, etc. You will get less number of technical questions if you divert the interviewer by speaking more about the company.
10. Dress right for the interview. Both for men and women, the best dress code for an interview is being conservative and formal. Avoid decorative and fancy stuff. Brush your hair and wear only a light make up. Look clean, fresh and impressive.
11. Collect all your educational and extracurricular certificates and neatly arrange them in a file and take them with you for the interview. It would be better if you hold the file in your hands. Present it to the interviewer when you are asked to.
12. Be confident and look confident. Don’t utter words of disbelief to your friends or colleagues at the interview site. Avoid words like “I don’t think I will make it this time”, “I’m not sure”, etc. If you don’t want to say you did well, then keep quiet. You need not say anything at all.

Stage Fear (Glossophobia)– How to Reduce and Overcome Stage Fear

This article will be useful for people who wants to speak in front of a crowd without any fear.

Glossophobia or speech anxiety is the fear of public speaking. If you have those sweaty palms, shivering hands, squeamish feelings in your stomach, rapid breathing, and a dry mouth before you go onstage, take comfort in the fact that you are not alone. In fact, it has been found that more than 95% of people are scared of giving a public speech or performing a public act and this goes way above death and spiders in the list of things that people fear the most.

We must understand that a little amount of stage fear is actually good. It helps us prepare and boosts up our adrenaline and pumps up our energy levels. But it should not be so acute that it starts to cripple our confidence and our career. Here are a few ways in which you can alleviate your stage fear.

Prepare and Practice

“A person who fails to prepare is a person who is preparing for failure”

The two Ps, thorough preparation and practice is the best possible key to a good presentation. Go through the material carefully and organize what you have to tell in a way such that the audience will find it easy to understand and assimilate. Anticipate all the easy and hard questions that may come your way while you do the presentation and also make a mental note of how best to answer those questions. This will prevent you from balking when someone asks a question. Once you are sure that you have prepared very well your confidence levels will automatically boost up and your nerves will hold longer than you had expected them to once you are on the stage.

Practicing again and again will go a long way in ensuring that you make a great presentation. Once you have decided on what you are going to speak, concentrate on how you are going to speak. The major work is done and so now we can start ironing out the nuances. Stand in front of the mirror and see how your body, and in particular your hands move. Notice your pitch and the speed at which you deliver the words. Too fast and it shows that you are nervous and your audience will have a hard time catching up with you; Too slow and they will start slumbering. Maintain a moderate pace so that they can ride along with you.

Come to terms with the fact that things can go wrong

Now that you have done your two Ps you must also accept the fact that you cannot control anything that is outside your sphere of influence. People from the audience can treat you with negative remarks or gestures but you should never allow them to get on your nerves. This can seriously injure your performance. The best trick to deal with this is to imagine your audience doing something silly (like wearing funny clothes, or having whiskers drawn on their faces). This will soothe you and make you more tolerant with your audience.

Also be aware that you can indeed make a mistake sometimes. After all everyone is mortal and we are prone to making errors. Every single person in the audience would definitely have had their own embarrassing moments. Accepting this can drastically reduce your fear of making a mistake.

Mug up your opening line so that even if you are too nervous to think, you can spit up the opening line. A few minutes into your speech you will start warming up.

Relax

It is very important that you relax the day before your big day. Take the speech thing out of your mind and indulge in something that you love. Listen to music, have a nice long bath, water your plants, rent a funny movie and laugh your head off. Make sure you get ample amount of sleep the night before the speech. This will leave you feeling fresh and confident the next day.

On your big day make sure that you eat something light. You don’t want to be feeling queasy along with everything else. Make sure that you arrive at your destination well before the scheduled time. But you also don’t want to arrive too early and spend a lot of time worrying about your performance. Once you are on the spot you can do some stretching, shoulder and neck rolls and arm swings to alleviate the tension in your muscles. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax. Smile, because studies have shown that when we smile we automatically tickle the pleasure sensors in our brain. Smells also have a relaxing effect on people (esp. jasmine and lavender). You can spray some on your Kleenex and inhale it to reassure your brain that everything is OK.

Tips and Tricks on Stage

Before you go onstage talk to someone to make sure that your voice is fine. Have a sip of water and then walk on to the stage with a confident upward posture. Remember that people are here to watch your performance and not to watch you. Try not to be self-conscious. If you feel your legs shaking, lean on the podium or try walking. Don’t carry notes with you as they will betray your trembling hands. Carry three by five cards that fit smugly in your palm. Don’t fidget or put your hands in your pocket.

Browse through the audience and identify a few friendly faces all around the room. When you are talking, take turns to look at those faces. This will give the illusion that you are making eye contact with everyone and will also prevent you from fixating at any one point of the room.

If you do make a mistake DO NOT panic. Instead be happy that the worst is over. Move on and complete your performance with aplomb.

Once you start practicing all this you will find that performing on stage is not a big deal after all. So purge all your self-doubts and deliver your speech with splendor and confidence!

How to Document Mini Projects and Final Year Projects

The documentation of your project is as important as doing the project. You cannot take your mini project everywhere for a demonstration and it is the hard and soft copies of your documentation that will speak for you. It often occurs that people would strive hard to do the project and fail to document it properly. This should not be the case as it spoils your efforts. Allot time and put your efforts in constructing the mini project documentation.

Parts of Documentation

The documentation most often people do is just the procedure of the mini project. This is really nothing when compare to the efforts you take in doing the project. Grab all the information that you need and put it as a raw collection. Determine the side headings that are best and could give the best possible explanation about the project. Now pick the contents from your collection and fill it up under the side headings. Some of the subtitles that are common and mandatory are given below.

Abstract and Introduction

The abstract is just one paragraph of what the project is and where it can be put into use. Just include a sentence of how it works and how it has been designed. The next part is the introduction where you can speak about all the basics of the things that you have used in the project. You can bring out circuit diagrams, flow charts in this section.

Design

In this segment, you can bring out the algorithm and procedure of the mini project. The construction of the mini project or the algorithm if in case of software based project can be elaborated. The entire flow can be explained in detail.

Working

Here is the highlight of the documentation where you can explain about the working of your project with all the internal mechanisms involved in the project. Every step of the project along with how one triggers the next step should be mentioned clearly. This should be the biggest part of your documentation. Avoid copying contents in the procedure segment and try to build your own content.

Conclusion and Application

As the last part of the documentation, bring out the conclusion in an impressive manner. The three or four lines that you are going to inscribe in the conclusion segment must be catchy and at the same time be factual. You can append a sub title application where you can explain the area where your project can be put into use in a detailed manner. Additional segments like advantages, limitations and future enhancements can be discussed in one paragraph each. This can picture your scope of the project. Add a title of references where you can briefly pen down the books, sites and people you referred in bringing out your project. Keep your documentation precise and speak about the usage often.