The 8-week placement prep plan that actually fits around college

Most placement prep advice assumes you have eight free hours a day. You do not. This plan assumes two hours on weekdays and four on weekends, which is what a final-year student can actually sustain.

Weeks 1–2: Fundamentals and the resume

DSA (1 hr/day): Arrays, strings, hashing. Twenty problems total. Do not move on until you can solve an easy array problem in under fifteen minutes without help.

Resume (weekend 1): One page. Three projects with links, not descriptions. Remove every line that says "hardworking" or "quick learner". Numbers where you have them: "reduced page load from 4s to 1.2s" beats "optimised performance".

Weeks 3–4: Core CS and project depth

DSA (1 hr/day): Two pointers, sliding window, recursion basics. Twenty-five problems.

Core CS (30 min/day): OOP concepts, DBMS normalisation and joins, OS process vs thread, basic networking. These get asked in every service-company interview and they are memorisation, not insight.

Project (weekends): Pick your best project and make it defensible. Be able to answer: why this database, what breaks at 10x users, what would you change.

Weeks 5–6: Trees, SQL and mock rounds

DSA: Linked lists, stacks, queues, binary trees. Thirty problems.

SQL (30 min/day): Joins, group by, window functions. Write queries by hand, not with autocomplete.

First mock interview (weekend 5): Get it done badly and early. The first mock is always bad. Better it happens in a lab than in a real interview.

Weeks 7–8: Aptitude, HR and repetition

Aptitude (45 min/day): Percentages, ratios, time-speed-distance, series. TCS, Infosys and Capgemini all gate on this and students who are good at coding routinely fail here.

HR prep: Prepare four stories — a conflict, a failure, something you taught yourself, why this company. Practise saying them out loud. Reading them is not the same.

Revision: Redo the DSA problems you got wrong. All of them.

The two rules that matter more than the schedule

Do it every day, badly, rather than perfectly twice a week. Consistency beats intensity for skill that has to be recalled under stress.

Track every application. Company, date, round reached, what went wrong. After fifteen applications the pattern in your rejections becomes obvious, and that pattern is your syllabus.

Students in our placement track run this plan with weekly mock interviews and a shared tracker. If you are doing it alone, tell one friend your weekly target — external accountability is doing a lot of the work here.