Thread by @gauravsabnis

A 🧵 on Indian "placement committees" & also lack thereof.

Yesterday in my grad Mktg Analytics class, I ended with saying @clootrack CEO @shameelabdulla was visiting to meet faculty for research collaboration. If y'all free, come, listen, absorb, network, & of course, hustle! /1

And many of them did. All international students, mostly Indian. We had a standing room only crowd. Listened, asked great questions, talked about their resumes cleverly, inquired about internships, jobs, etc.

As I observed from sidelines, I contrasted it with my student days.

In engg college & also in IIM, placecom did all the hustling. Others just sat on their butt, went for interviews when summoned. A job fell in your lap cos COEP/IIM.

They had to have mandatory attendance policies to ensure students show up for "pre placement talks" by companies.

16 years ago when I moved to the US for my PhD, when I would list things in US that are more "backward" than India, I would list online banking, health insurance system, cellphone plans, and in engg/MBA programs, no placecom!

I now see how wildly wrong I was about the last one.

That voluntary hustling, selling your skills, making an impression, and just listening, truly listening to someone talk about their business (as opposed to focusing on where the sign in sheet is for attendance), that teaches & gives you as much if not more than a class lecture.

When I say "no placecom", it doesn't mean US unis just leave students on their own to find a job. On the contrary, placement offices in a US univs is WAYYY better staffed, funded, trained, involved than Indian ones. There are career placement professionals we hire.

Full scale department it is, not a small office staffed by unpaid full time students juggling demanding courses with free labor, and a couple of clerical staff.
But if does NOT spoon feed you jobs like Indian placecoms. It brings companies, arranges talks/fairs, and that's that.

Once the company gets to campus, it's between them and students. Placement office offers services like resume proofing, mock interviews, company dossiers. Great support staff. LOTS of resources.

But it's on you to get that interview. There is no politburo style placecom.

Now in case you're wondering how it works in India. Ugh, after seen more than my tiny pond from 2 decades ago, it is the wrong mechanism at so many levels!

The only paid full time staff in Indian placement offices are bare bones admin & custodial. Everything else is free labor.

Faculty member in charge is usually a full time professor, and placement "committees" are chosen by students, often through random competitive processes reminiscent of reality TV. It's a creepy implicit deal. These handful of students will do ALL the liaising, selling for free...

In exchange, rest of the students treat placecom like a divine authority, obeying their commands on where you can and can't apply. And they get first dibs on the jobs. In IIML, one placecom dude practically told everyone, OLAM is gonna be mine, don't even bother applying.

Placecoms are intense high pressure toxic entities. I've seen them turn perfectly nice pleasant guys into compulsively manipulative and overbearing tinpot dictators. Trigger mental health issues. Whip up this hunger games type atmosphere.

Without any legal or formal authority.

When you are in your 20s hungry for that first job, that Faustian deal is actually pretty sweet. Becomes a bit like the Stanford prison experiment. Those dudes act like prison guards and we cooperate by acting like obedient prisoners.

Cos job with little grunt work.

I got my 1st job by just making a lot of photocopies of my CV, going to talks per quota, showing up for interviews and getting an offer. They only thing I really "learned" in that process was how to tie a full Windsor knot.

Yesterday my students learned so much more in an hour.

In IIM it was even easier! Because *a* job paying at least 4lakh (2004 rupees) way pretty much guaranteed. And the interviews were all stacked into one "placement week". Like an assembly line of junior managers.

I don't even remember what I said in my IBM interview. But I got in

You sat in a room as students a year junior to you put in unpaid labor for you, arranging food, refreshments, coffee, etc. Manage the entire schedule to fit it in a few days.

American placement offices just hire professional catering staff and professional placement managers. 🤷🏽‍♂️

The US system forces you out of your shell though. It's not a job raffle. You have to do everything else AND also learn the full Windsor by yourself. Hustle, network, make contacts, make pitches almost throughout your course. Truly atmanirbhar!
You grow up so much in that!

As I often tell my students who are fellow immigrants to Asia, what people call "soft skills" are actually the hardest skills to master. And in the US system, extremely valuable if you want to rise high. Not just to get a job. But later in life and your career.

Oh yes. Placecoms are almost exclusively my fellow oppressor caste folks. Mostly men. It's not always explicit casteism, tho it is way more often than you'd think. The previous year's placecom chooses the next year's. You can guess the "diversity".

https://twitter.com/subbu_q/status/1499015372246482945?t=5IHCQSc4KqMEn9hpwzDluA&s=19

Even when it is not explicit, conscious casteism or misogyny, the desirable traits as defined for a placecom member are very highly correlated with savarna male privilege. If your daddy has contacts, you're more desirable. Perpetuation of casteism is built into the system.

A couple of years ago, I reconnected with an old IIML friend. We had been pally in the first few months of MBA. Then he got on placecom. He became a strange version of himself. We were still friendly throughout. But only recently did I get to know the chill fun relaxed him.

And we talked about it. I told him. It's good to have the you of first term back cos placecom, you know. To sit and talk about sci fi and cooking and hiking and such like normal friends instead of feeling anxiety at you and the other guys talking down to us for 2 yrs. He agreed.

I suggested that he and a few others should start a "Placecom Members Against Placecom" organization lol.

Anyway, I'm not saying get rid of placecom or don't get rid of placecom. As Master Oogway said, noodles, don't noodles!

Just pointing out how it plays out. Not great.

My grad marketing classes have 3 distinct "segments". Indian students, East Asian students, and American undergrads driven enough to take a 600 level course. The differences not just in presentation skills, but responding to difficult questions, are very stark. At the start.

The American undergrads always top this course. Cos their taking the elective itself shows their competence and confidence in quant stuff. So they have that down. Plus the US school and college system puts them in front of an audience or a recruiter so often, they are seasoned!

The South and East Asian students who come out of their shells at my prodding, having to not just get the right answer from the program, but also explain and defend it against "out of syllabus" questions, end up later talking about how much that helped in interviews etc.

A huge advantage students in American universities have is there is someone or the other from industry visiting the university pretty much every week or every day, not just for placement and recruiting. So students get opportunities for exposure & self pitching on a daily basis.

A reason so many more engineers, MBAs in US go into entrepreneurship is this constant exposure to industry. My small private business school grad student body as well as faculty roster is smaller than a typical IIM.
But we have more visits in a month than an IIM has in a year.

And I'm not even talking about research seminars by scholars visiting from other schools. It's one of the expectations on tenure track. Going not just to conferences but to other universities to present your research, and arranging such talks in your school. Good incentives.

It is crazy how much intellectual activity and knowledge sharing happens in universities in the US on a daily basis. Why universities are one of this country's biggest assets, even with all their flaws and dark histories.