Has Anyone Recently Been Placed Through VGI Campus Recruitment? A Parent’s Honest Update
Last month, I was folding Arjun’s college laundry at the kitchen table, my half-empty chai growing cold beside me, when he slammed his laptop shut hard enough to rattle the sugar bowl. “Mona di got her offer letter today,” he said, staring at the floor. “TCS, 4.5 LPA. She got it through VGI’s campus recruitment drive.” I nodded, because I’d already seen the post in the VGI parent Facebook group that morning. The top comment thread was full of the same question I’d been scrolling through for weeks: Has anyone recently been placed through VGI campus recruitment? Most of the comments were anonymous, tight with worry—parents like me, whose kids were still waiting, no offer in sight, graduation three months away.
I’d paid the full four years of tuition for Arjun’s mechanical engineering degree, like most of the other parents, and we’d all sat through the orientation talk where the college promised full placement support. So when September rolled around and Arjun hadn’t gotten a single shortlist, I started panicking too. I posted that question myself, anonymously, got a handful of replies that were all over the place—one person said their kid got placed in October, another said no one they know has gotten anything all semester. I decided to stop scrolling and ask the people I actually knew: Arjun’s classmates, their parents, and then I signed up for the placement cell meeting the college held for parents last month.
I drove the 45 minutes to the campus that Saturday, the parking lot full of other parents craning their necks to find the lecture hall. The placement coordinator went through the numbers, plain and simple: as of mid-November, 38% of the final year batch had received offers through on-campus drives. Most of those were IT roles, because mass recruitment drives for IT happen early in the year. Core sector drives for mechanical, civil, and electrical don’t start until January, and go through the end of March. That was the first thing I got wrong— I’d assumed all drives happened in the first semester, and if you didn’t have an offer by December, you were out of luck.
Arjun and I counted up the 12 people in his immediate friend group across three departments to get a real, small-scale sense. 5 have offers right now: two IT, one core manufacturing, two BBA roles in marketing. 3 have final rounds scheduled for January, 4 haven’t gotten a shortlist yet. The ones who haven’t are mostly kids who had a backlog that cleared just last semester, or who fell just below the 60% aggregate cut off most big companies require. So the real answer to the question everyone is asking is yes, plenty of people have been placed recently through VGI campus recruitment, but it doesn’t happen the same way for everyone, and it doesn’t all happen in the first few months of final year.
After that meeting, I stopped asking Arjun every night if he’d heard any news, and started doing small concrete things that actually moved things forward. The first thing we did was pull up the official placement calendar the college shared with students, and marked every drive Arjun was eligible for on our fridge calendar. That took all the guesswork out of it— I knew when the next deadline was, so I didn’t have to pester him for updates every day. That alone cut down on half the fights we were having about placements.
Next, I looked at his resume. It was three pages long, with his 12th grade football awards, a full list of every first year course he’d taken, and his internship project buried at the bottom. We sat down on a Sunday afternoon, cut it down to one page, moved his summer internship work on solar panel efficiency to the top, and cut all the irrelevant fluff. A week later, he got his first shortlist for an off-campus drive the placement cell was sharing with interested students.
When Arjun fell just two points below the 60% aggregate cut off for one of the biggest upcoming drives, I learned another small trick. He had missed half of first year with dengue, which pulled his average down, and he assumed he couldn’t apply. I helped him write a short, polite email to the placement coordinator explaining the situation, and attached a copy of his old medical certificates. Three days later, he got permission to sit for the aptitude test. Most parents I talked to didn’t know you could request an exception for extenuating circumstances— you just have to ask, instead of assuming the rule is absolute.
A lot of parents in the group argue the college inflates placement numbers, and that’s fair to question— but what I’ve found is that most of our panic comes from secondhand rumors and out-of-context posts online, not the actual facts for our own kid’s department and situation. When another mom posted the same question last week, I didn’t reply with a generic “don’t worry, everything works out” line. I told her to email the placement cell directly to get the timeline for her kid’s department, check if any exceptions to cut offs are possible if your kid needs one, and spend an hour a week going over aptitude questions with them instead of just asking when they’ll get a job.
Arjun’s aptitude test for that drive is next Saturday. We practice 10 questions after dinner every night, and I make his favorite lemon rice for Sunday lunch. He still gets quiet when a friend gets an offer he doesn’t have, and I still get that little twist in my chest when I scroll the parent group before bed. We don’t have an offer yet, and we might not for another couple months. But we stopped panicking long enough to do the small, steady things that actually help. No one can promise your kid will get an offer by a certain date, but so far, showing up for the small stuff has worked better than scrolling for reassurance. That’s where we are right now.
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