Here is what you can do to avoid getting placed late or not getting placed in your dream company:
- Do a pre-mortem: Assume you failed. What went wrong?
- Define the failure: look at the good and bad aspects.
Good failure
Not placed but you learn from your mistakes and go on to get placed.
Bad failure
Not placed until the end.
Define failure in advance
- Write a short overview for the time left at college.
- Failure exercise:
* Imagine it is the day when you are leaving college and everything has gone horribly wrong. You may not have gotten your dream company/role or been placed at all.
* List all the possible reasons for this failure — small or big (do not write solutions just yet).
* Pick the top problems and rank them according to things you have control over and discard those you have no control over.
- Solution exercise:
* Identify proactive solution (to prevent)
* Find back-up plans (to repair)
With the above check-list, you can define, prevent or repair problems. While executing the action plan, identify the small things first, those you can fail safely at (small cost for failure), and learn from this experiment.
(The writer is a business consultant at TATA Consultancy Services.)