What I Wish I Knew Before Graduating

Let me be direct about something that took me two years to fully accept: the placement system at most tier-3 colleges in India is not a meritocracy. It is a lottery with a CGPA filter at the door. And the sooner you understand that, the less time you waste believing the game is fair.

I built projects. I ground through LeetCode. I learned the stack companies actually use in production. None of that moved the needle inside my college's placement process. What moved the needle — the only thing that consistently moved the needle — was a number. Seven point five or above, and doors opened. Below that, you were invisible. Skills were irrelevant.

The CGPA game nobody admits to

Here is what actually happens during campus placement season. A recruiter sends a job description to the Training and Placement cell. The T&P cell runs a CGPA cutoff — 7.0, 7.5, sometimes 8.0. Everyone above the line gets an email. Everyone below the line never finds out the company visited. No portfolio review. No GitHub profile. No side projects. Just a number from semesters where the exam questions were leaked or curved anyway.

I watched classmates who could not write a working for-loop get placed at IT service companies because they had a 8.2. I watched people who had shipped real products to real users get rejected at the shortlisting stage because they had a 6.9. The correlation between CGPA and placement outcomes at my college was strong. The correlation between actual ability and placement outcomes was close to zero.

"The system was never designed to find the best engineers. It was designed to process bodies into seats as efficiently as possible."

Placement season is exhausting — and it is a scam

I will use that word deliberately. Scam. Not because companies are fraudulent, but because the entire performance around campus recruitment is built on a false promise. Colleges advertise placement percentages in brochures. They count every student who gets placed, even in roles paying ₹2.5 LPA for service-desk work that has nothing to do with the degree. The number looks impressive. The reality does not.

The season itself is months of opening the same portal every morning, watching the same companies visit, attending pre-placement talks designed to make you feel lucky for the opportunity to apply, and then hearing nothing. It is demoralizing by design — or at least demoralizing by indifference, which amounts to the same thing.

What I wish I had done certain things differently

I wish I had understood earlier that the job market outside campus is a completely different game. On the open market, a well-built project, a clean GitHub, a thoughtful portfolio, and the ability to talk technically about your own work matters enormously. The CGPA filter still exists at some companies — but it competes with actual evidence of competence rather than replacing it.

The best thing you can do in a tier-3 college is stop optimizing for the placement process and start building for the world outside it. Build things. Write about what you build. Put it where people can find it. The campus placement system was not built for you — it was built for the college's marketing brochure.

Your skills are real. The system just was not designed to see them. Build in the open until the right people can.