IIT-K student hits record ₹4 crore placement jackpot

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) Tuesday started the final hiring season for their outgoing batches in a robust note negating the economic downturn as companies hired more and offered better pay packages on the first day.

While IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati and IIT Kanpur bagged between 69 and 125 offers in the first half of the day, IIT Madras said 123 offers were made in the same time. This was excluding the pre-placement offers made to the students before the final campus placement began on Tuesday. And authorities said by tomorrow over 1500 offers will be bagged by students of the older IITs.

“The placement processes this year is robust despite the economic concerns, and the average salary offered this year to our students is higher than last year. Though the final numbers of Day one will be available by Wednesday as hiring continues till late in the evening, over 100 students were already placed in the first half of the first day," said Bhavesh Loungani, a placement coordinator at IIT Kanpur.

High-frequency and quantitative trading firms snapped up top talent from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) on Thursday, offering salaries as high as ₹4 crore, as the placements season kicked off at the country’s premier engineering schools.

“Jane Street has offered one of our students about ₹4 crore," said a placement team student member at IIT-Kanpur. Mails to both IIT-Kanpur and Jane Street remained unanswered. Despite the new record offer from proprietary trading firm Jane Street Capital, many bluechip companies have stayed away, scalded by the ongoing economic slowdown.

Companies like Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, Walmart, Bajaj Auto, JP Morgan Chase and Co, Flipkart among others hired from multiple IITs. Though IITs did not divulge the salary details, sources in some of the older IITs said that multiple students in several campuses bagged offers in “excess of Rs.50 lakh per annum and few students across IITs also got package in excess of Rs. 1 crore each".

The campus hiring this year at IITs are happening virtually due to Covid-19 restrictions and students studying largely from remote locations as classes in campuses are closed