I Prepped for Placements for 14 Months. An Honest Post-Mortem.

Placement preparation at IIT Kanpur starts, for the conscientious students, about fourteen months before the actual placement season. I was a conscientious student, so I started in August of my second semester of third year, which gave me until October of fourth year when the on-campus companies start interviewing. What follows is an honest evaluation of what I did and how it performed, written three months after I accepted an offer.

What I Did With 14 Months

Months 1-4 (August-November, 3rd year): DSA fundamentals. I went through a structured curriculum, roughly 200 problems, covering arrays, strings, trees, graphs, and dynamic programming. I was building from a reasonable base, having done some competitive programming in my first year. The work in this period was the most clearly valuable in retrospect. Fundamentals do not expire.

Months 5-8 (December-March): This is where I made mistakes. I signed up for a paid placement prep course that promised mock interviews and industry mentorship. The mock interviews were useful. The mentorship matched me with someone whose industry experience was from 2019, in a company I was not targeting, in a market that had changed significantly. I spent 40 hours on this course and extracted maybe 8 hours of actual value. The problem was not that the course was bad; it was that I had not evaluated it critically before paying for it.

Months 9-12 (April-July): System design. This was underinvested by most of my peers and was, in interviews, one of the areas where I consistently outperformed my peers who had similar DSA preparation. System design is teachable and the number of people who practice it seriously before fourth year is lower than you would expect given how heavily it is tested.

What I Would Do Differently

Skip months 5-8 entirely and spend that time on system design earlier. The paid course was a time and money waste relative to free resources, Neetcode for DSA and Grokking for system design, which I found in month 9. I would have also started behavioural preparation in month 3 rather than month 12. Behavioural prep done late feels like cramming. Done early, it becomes a natural way of thinking about your own experience.

The One Resource

The thing I wish I had found in month one: a small group of three or four peers who were serious about the same companies, doing weekly mock interviews with each other. This is not a product or a course. It is a habit. The feedback quality is lower than a professional mentor but the frequency is higher and the peer understanding of the specific context is deeper. I found this group in month 11. I wish I had built it in month one.

• Fundamentals early, system design early — do not leave either for Q4 of prep

• Evaluate paid courses critically; many free resources are equal or better

• Behavioural prep is a practised skill, not a last-minute activity

• Build a small serious peer group for mock interviews as early as possible

• Apply broadly — good companies that do not have campus presence are findable off-campus