Lucknow, July 19: Tech school graduates are going the B-school way, without going to B-school.
Vikas Chowdhary, an electronics engineer, topped the placements at IIT Kanpur this year with a Rs 12 lakh a year offer.
The boy from Jaipur has wasted no time in joining Schlumberger Offshore Services Ltd, a global oilfield services provider. After a year’s training, Vikas is likely to be posted in Asia and will have to do a fair bit of travelling.
“The assignment is challenging... I look forward to doing my best,” said Vikas, thrilled at getting a start engineers can only dream of.
For IITians, the upper limit at placements usually is Rs 8 lakh, unlike B-school graduates for whom sky is the limit. At IIT Kanpur last year, the highest offer was for Rs 7.5 lakh.
But Vikas is not the only graduate who has bettered last year’s performance.
Software engineers Nalam Ramakrishna from Srikakulam and Shivesh Rajan from Surat have both got an offer of Rs 8.8 lakh. They will be joining Trilogy, among the world’s largest privately held software companies, and will be based in Bangalore. “I think the offer was quite impressive. I will be based in Bangalore. I am happy,” said Ramakrishna.
Not just higher pay, the IIT Kanpur placements have drawn multinational companies normally seen recruiting at B-schools. McKinsey was one.
But its offer of Rs 7.5 lakh to Indrajit Ray is likely to be passed up because the Kanpur boy has decided to tread the tech school-business school path. “The offer was not bad. But I have already made up my mind to go abroad for further studies,” he says.
Indrajit is doing what scores of IITians do every year ? arm themselves with a management degree to improve value in the job market. While the upper limit for IIT graduates is usually Rs 8 lakh, those who also have an IIM degree are assured of anything between Rs 7 lakh and Rs 14 lakh or even higher.
IIT Kanpur has scored 84.54 per cent on placements, a big jump from 64 per cent last year. Placement director Vinod Tare said many M.Tech students opted for research, otherwise the figure would have been higher.
Kanpur has done better than the Kharagpur, Roorkee and Mumbai and Guwahati IITs, officials said.
