I-banks, consulting, PE firms vie for IIM-C students

The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C), which started its summer placements process today, saw offers trickling in from the world’s leading finance and consulting firms on day one.

IIM-C has 408 students to place this year — around 100 more than the 2008 and 2007 summer placements. Student committees handling placements for this year said “the number of offers made per student and number of recruiters who turned up for the placements has increased, but has not quite touched the 2007 levels as yet”.

Traditional recruiters returned to campus this year, which made IIM-C see some big offers from banks such as Barclays Capital, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and UBS. RBS was the largest recruiter of the day, recruiting 11 students.

Morgan Stanley recruited from IIM Calcutta exclusively for its London desk. The banks offered profiles in investment banking divisions, global markets, equity research, sales and corporate banking.

“The absence of Lehman Brothers was no longer felt, with Nomura, the firm that took over Lehman, making offers,” said a statement from IIM-C.

The world’s leading consulting firms, too, were among the first-day recruiters. So were private equity companies. The first day of summer placement interviews at IIM-C in 2008 had seen around 100 students being placed.

IIM-Bangalore starts its summer placement process from November 6. IIM-Ahmedabad, which started its summer placements earlier this week, has also seen encouraging response from recruiters.

The IIM-A first-year postgraduate programme batch of 2009-11 would be the biggest, with 330 students (numbers increased after implementation of the OBC quota and increase in general quota seats) going for summer placements this year.

The summer placement process is expected to continue for a week. Summer internships are mandatory and students will spend 8-10 weeks as interns in these companies in the months of April-May next year (2010). Many of these lead in time to final job placements as well.

IIM-A name for second day a puzzle...
What’s ‘Day 0.5’? It’s the name that the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) used to notify the second day of its summer internship programme instead of calling it Day 1 (after Slot Zero or Day 0).

While the institute did not give any reason for this, a source on the campus explained that “Day 0.5 is not a commonly-used term during placements but it exists and has been used by IIM-A to give the impression to top companies that they were not passed over from Day 0 to Day 1”.