Hi, Here's my debrief of the PGPX interview for round 1. Hope it will be useful for some of you in round 2.
Date : 20th Nov 2016 @ Ahmedabad
There were 2 profs in the panel - One bearded prof and other a bald one. The topic for extempore was - Networking is more essential than Academics to succeed in life. The prof asked me to replace the chit if I was uncomfortable with the given topic (thats a very tempting scenario btw, because not only you are blank about the current topic, but also equally unsure about the next chit too). I decided to stick the current one. There was a notepad and pencil and they gave 3 minutes to prepare and jot down my points.
I jotted down a couple of points about both academics and networking (pros and cons of each) and luckily remembered couple of examples of people who succeeded via both (Zuckerburg, Lalit Modi etc). Managed to speak for around 2-3 minutes, after which I was asked a few more questions on the same topic. One of the questions was - For winning a nobel prize, what would be most essential - Academic or Networking? I tried to strike a balance by throwing some garbage at them (e.g. initially you need academics to reach certain level but later on its more on how you network your resources etc). But they must have caught my bluff because they then asked me to choose only one :D - This time I went with Academics (right or wrong, no idea).
Next question on same topic - So what about the movie industry then, does talent matter more or networking? This time I sided with networking, saying most of the new stars are starsons or people who are already priveleged in some way. He further asked - What about longevity, do actors who come to industry via networking last longer than those who stick by merit? Here too my answer remained the same, I explained actors who have good network continue to occupy good enough roles till they fade out as compared to lesser known talented actors. No more questions on extempore after this.
Later most of the questions were my work profile related. What I do for a living, what are my daily duties, about the various cost by which customers are charged (fixed cost, time and material etc). If a customer wants a combination of both fixed costs and T&M costs in my your project then what would be your proposal, etc. Majority of the discussion ran on this part and though there were many counter questions on my answers, good thing was they allowed me to finish my answers all the time.
Then why PGPX was asked. Whatever I answered it seemed they were not really interested in it (it was anyway a standard mugged up answer).
Lastly, they asked a question about something I wrote in my profile (in fact the only question asked from my application). I had been finalist at one of the humorous speech competitions, they asked me to create something humouous example from the extempre topic. I struggled for some 30 seconds before coming up with some shitty example about my school life.
both said thank you and that was it.