XLRI-BM GD-PI experience

GD Topic: “The government is solely responsible the growing unemployment in the country.”

Wasn’t great. Spoke 2 times. Made some different points from the rest.

PI:

3 Male Professors. All 50+. I was 8^th to go in.

P2: Are tum yahi ho is photo wale (indicating to my photo on the form that I had filled while applying for XAT. They had a printout of it) 

Me: Yes Sir. I look completely different with a beard

P2: Why did you shave? We would have liked to see you this way. You are looking good in this

P1: When did you cut your beard?

Me: Just yesterday.

P1: Oh, you cut it just for the interview.

Me: Yes Sir, I had a month-old beard until yesterday.

P1: How many people in your batch keep beard?

Me: In ZS, where I work, around 70-80% people keep beard. But most of them don’t grow it too much.

P1: So they keep it trimmed.

Me: Yes Sir. Though one or two keep longish beard (indicating with my hands how long)

P1: Many youngsters want to keep beard nowadays.

Me: Yes Sir, just yesterday I was reading how keeping a beard help people with a bad jawline in looking good.

P1: In our times, most people preferred to be clean shaven. Now people keep all sorts of beards. Why do you think this shift is happening?

Me: Youngsters are increasingly seeing beard as a fashion statement. Also, some famous personalities who have beard, like Ranveer Kapoor and Virat Kohali, have made it famous recently.

P1: If you have to list five Indian states having highest HDI, how would you do it?

Me: I would start with finding the factors that are used to calculate HDI

P2 hands me over a pen and notepad.

P1: List down the component factors:

Listed Literacy, income level, life expectancy, and infant mortality.

[Blunder]

P1: Why do you think infant mortality is a factor in finding HDI?
Me: Sir I think infant mortality indicates the ability of our society as a whole in providing adequate nutrition to the new born, also it indicates the health and economic status of the generation higher than the newly born babies. The less the infant mortality, the more prosperous a society is.

P1: Who calculates the HDI for different countries?

Me: I don’t know exactly, but it’s a UN body.

P1: A UN body…

Me: I think UNESCO.. No, what am I saying, UNESCO is related to culture and heritage. It might be WHO.

P1: Did you study economics in your course?

Me: Yes Sir, there was a course on Managerial Economics in our 2^nd year.

P1: Managerial Economics..What did you study in it?

Me: We learned the basics of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. We learned what is fiscal policy, what is monetary policy, and things like what’s the effect of change in interest rates or inflation on an economy.

P1 keeps looking at me.

Me: And there was a concept of Labour and Capital as well. For example, we learned that as a country transitions from a developing country to a developed country, it cannot continue to grow at the same pace as it was growing before. It would require much more innovation and intensive capital to continue growing at the same rate.

P1: What was your stream in B.Tech?

Me: Electronics and Communication Engineering.

P1: Where did you do your training from?

Me: BSNL Dhanbad.

P1: What did you do there?

Me: We were given an overview of how telephonic and mobile communication work. For example, when we place a phone call, it’s first connected to the BTS, after that it’s transferred to the receiver.

P1 is done. P3 puts my form in front of P2, after circling something.

P2: So you worked in a training firm for some time, opened a training firm of your own, then left it within a month, and started working in this ZS Associates.

I explained that I didn’t leave what I started. The website was not letting me input the experience in ZS without entering a closing date for it.

P2: But still you left it and joined ZS.

P2: But what is this platform about (the one I started)?

P2: Who is managing it right now?

P2: But it requires full time effort, how can you handle it with another job?

There were 2-3 more questions on the same line.

P2 is done.

P3: What was your stream?

(He was looking into my file throughout, so maybe he didn’t hear earlier)

Me: Sir, Electronics and Communication.

P3: And you are currently working at ZS. What do you do?

Me: I work as a Decision Analyst.

P3: No, I don’t the specifics of it. Explain your work to me.

Me: Sir ZS is primarily involved in three sectors: Pharma, MPS – that is Medical Products and Services, and the third one they have named Priority Industries – it contains everything except Pharma and Medical Products, like airlines and technology companies. I work in the MPS division. Our clients are manufacturers of Medical Products like syringes, gloves, facial masks etc. They approach us for salesforce structure, sizing, better territory alignment etc. So we take their data and the other market data, analyse it and provide solutions to their problems.

P3: What kind of data do you need?

Me: So, for example, we recently rolled out a survey for the salesforce of a client. It was a long survey having around 100 questions. We asked them ***. Then we analyse the…

P3: How do you analyse it, what’s the process?

Me: Sir there are various ways. In USA, there are IHNs – Integrated Hospital Networks, and GPOs – Group Purchasing Organizations. So we identify which ***

P3: How do you calculate the market potential?

Answered with an example.

P3: If you have to improve the primary education in the country, what kind of data would you need, how would you go on?

Me: Sir, from the ZS way..

P3: No, not from the ZS way, explain from an analyst’s viewpoint.

Me: Sir, first I would like to gather data about students and schools. I would like to know things like how the students are spending their time, how many classes are conducted daily, what are the subjects having high failure rate, how many hours are spent on extracurricular activities, are the students feeling demotivated or stressed when exams approach. Then I would like to analyse the data of better performing schools or students and see what they are doing differently.

P3: Okay, that will be all. You can collect your file.

Me: Thankyou Sirs.

P1: Thankyou Nitesh. What does Nitesh mean by the way?

Me: Sir, it’s a synonym of Lord Shiva. It’s made from Nit+Ish – the God of everyday.

Verdict: Converted. Maybe the percentile (99.91) helped.