Saw many people asking what to do after joining a college so, here’s something.

Please note that this is from my personal experience in B-School.

Objectively speaking according to roles:

1. Product management: communication, case practice, previous workex in product/consulting, overall good profile

2. Consulting: communication, case practice, cfa (even level 1 helps), overall good profile

3: ops: some good certifications (six sigma, etc), ops style cases, communication

4. Fin: good past acads, relevant workex in fin/consulting, communication, cfa (more levels the better)/ca

5: sales/marketing: communication, good past acads

So the most common criteria is communication and if you already have a good profile (pors/workex/good acads/etc), whatever you do in b school wouldn’t actually matter much.

But what if you have a bad profile?

Objectively for shortlisting purpose in sip, you won’t be able to do anything now other than improving your communication skills for shortlists you are already going to get. For finals, few things can land you more shortlists than others:

1. Cfa/frm/six sigma/etc: in this list six sigma is mostly overrated but it helps sometimes. Cfa and frm will definitely give you few shortlists that you otherwise might not get.

2. Finals for freshers can be effected by their sip as well as live projects that they do. For folks with workex, you’ll get different domain opportunities, but it’ll be because of your already made profile.

Things that people are mentioning: clubs, communities, pors, case competitions: sure! They’ll help qualitatively AFTER you get a shortlist. These won’t help you getting a shortlist.

My cv was like: bad acads, winner of 6 case competitions, good pors, good live projects and sip, civil engineering workex. In interviews, I was mostly asked case studies, about my workex, maybe some live project (if relevant), and general hr questions.