Has Anyone Recently Been Placed Through VGI Campus Recruitment? A Parent’s Honest Update
I was folding laundry at the kitchen table last Sunday when my son Aryan, a final-year mechanical engineering student at VGI, pushed his phone across the table toward me. The screen showed a thread in the VGI 2024 graduating batch Facebook group, and the top question was exactly what I’d seen pop up in the parent WhatsApp group a dozen times that semester: “Has anyone actually been placed through campus recruitment recently?” The coffee mug next to his bowl of cereal was sweating through a paper coaster, and my younger daughter was yelling from the living room about a cartoon character that stole her cookie. I wiped spaghetti sauce off the counter and sat down next to him, because I’d been wondering the same thing for months.
When we enrolled Aryan three years ago, the glossy admissions brochure had a big bold graphic that said 92% placement, average CTC 4.8 LPA. We drove three hours from our small town in western Uttar Pradesh to visit the campus, ate lukewarm samosas at the student cafeteria, talked to two computer science students who’d gotten placed that year, and thought this was a solid bet. Aryan scored decent but not great on JEE, and we scraped together the first year’s tuition with a small education loan and some savings from my husband’s hardware shop. We counted on the campus recruitment they promised to make it worth it.
The first two years were fine. He came home for holidays, talked about cricket matches and late-night canteen runs, complained about lab assignments like any other college kid. Then final year started, and the tone of his calls changed. The first round of placements hit in August, and every company that showed up was a BPO hiring for customer support or an edtech firm hiring for entry-level sales. The pay ranged from 2.1 to 2.7 LPA, less than half what the brochure advertised for core engineering roles. Aryan didn’t even bother sitting for those interviews. The training and placement officer told the batch core mechanical companies would visit by mid-September. Mid-September came and went, then October, and here we are in mid-November. As of this week, only 12 of the 62 students in Aryan’s mechanical batch have gotten job offers through campus recruitment, and seven of those 12 took non-core roles just to have something lined up.
The first time I saw the placement question pop up in the parent group, I held my breath waiting for answers. Only two people replied: one said her kid got a BPO offer, the other said her son was still waiting. After that, the thread went quiet. Most parents are too embarrassed to say their kid hasn’t gotten anything yet, and the ones who have offers don’t want to seem like they’re bragging. That leaves everyone more anxious than they started, scrolling back through old threads looking for clues.
I’ll admit I messed up the first month. I asked Aryan about placements every single time he called. I brought it up as soon as he walked in the door for the weekend. He stopped calling as much, and when he was home, he’d just sit scrolling his phone instead of working on the 3D printing portfolio he’d planned to build for job applications. Then I talked to my sister, whose son is in final year at a college in Pune, and she said the exact same thing was happening there. That’s when I realized I was adding to his stress instead of helping, so I made a few small, concrete changes that have made a big difference.
First, I turned off notifications for the parent group. I check it once a week on Sunday, instead of every 10 minutes when I’m waiting for my tea to steep. That cut out the constant background anxiety that kept niggling at me all day. Second, I stopped bringing up placement unprompted. If Aryan wants to talk about it, he will. If not, we talk about his project, the inter-college cricket tournament he played last month, or the new chai place near his hostel. We only have a formal 20-minute check-in after dinner every Sunday, if he wants to talk about next steps, ask for help covering travel costs for an off-campus interview, or practice interview questions with my husband, who’s run his own business for 20 years and knows how to talk to hiring managers. That’s it, no more daily pestering.
We also stopped putting all our eggs in the campus recruitment basket. Aryan started connecting with VGI alumni on LinkedIn a couple of months ago, not just asking for jobs, but asking what skills they wish they’d focused on before graduating and what companies are hiring for entry-level roles right now. One alumnus who graduated two years ago works at a construction equipment company in Gurugram, remembered Aryan from helping him wrap up his final year project when he was still on campus, and referred him for an open graduate engineer trainee role. Aryan has his interview next week.
The truth is, some people have been placed through VGI campus recruitment this year. Almost all of them are from computer science and IT, with a handful from electrical engineering. Core branches like mechanical and civil are having a really slow year, just like they are at a lot of mid-tier private colleges right now. The question everyone is asking makes total sense – we all just want to know what to expect, whether the time and money we invested is going to pay off. But fixating on how many people got placed through campus this semester doesn’t change much. Last year’s stats don’t guarantee this year’s outcomes, when the job market for core engineering is tighter than it was 12 months ago.
Right now, we still don’t know how Aryan’s interview next week will go. It’s not an offer through VGI’s campus recruitment, but it’s a role he actually wants, that pays what he expected for a first job. The constant low-level anxiety we had two months ago is gone, mostly because we stopped waiting for the college to hand us a finished outcome and started taking small, steady steps on our own. I don’t have a neat answer for anyone else asking the same question – some get placed through campus recruitment, some don’t. What I do know is that refreshing the parent group 10 times a day doesn’t help anyone, and one small step a week with your kid toward their search counts for a lot more.
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