How to Prepare for MBA Placements: A Parul University Student’s Journey to Ola Electric!

Interestingly, each MBA student wants a good placement, but the ones who reach there hold a specific kind of pattern. Be it studying or working, they wake up early, follow a routine, build skills, and learn to perform! Meet one of those rockstars – Ritik Chand, a proud MBA student of PIMR (Parul Institute of Management & Research). Hailing from Madhya Pradesh, he navigated his MBA with a sheer focus on real-world skills, and that’s when he championed a package of 6.5 lakhs at Ola Electric!

Ritik’s route into management was not a straight line. During and after his graduation phase, he was focused on cracking the UPSC exam. Amidst all of that, he found his passion towards business & management, and so he chose Parul University for an MBA degree. For the specialisation part, he chose International Trade & Business, following his interest in financial markets. Among his favourite subjects, he was more inclined towards business statistics, and that’s when he got clearer about data, markets, technology, and the practical side of business.

Ritik is clear that the most useful parts of his MBA happened partly outside the lecture hall. As part of the program, he completed a 45-day internship as a supply chain management intern, his first real industry experience, which showed him how supply chain operations actually function beyond the theory. Industry visits reinforced the lesson: he visited a cotton textile unit and air-freight companies and saw first-hand how the stages of an industrial process connect and how raw materials move, step by step, into finished goods. For a management student, seeing a real operation is often what makes classroom concepts finally click.

If there is one part of Ritik’s preparation that aspiring students should copy, it is his focus on practical data skills. Through the university’s Impact Training program, he built exactly the tools that employers now expect, and he is emphatic about their value.

• Advanced Excel: The everyday language of business analysis, from formulas to structured reporting.
• Power BI: Building interactive dashboards that turn raw data into clear, decision-ready insight.
• SQL: The skill he recommends adding alongside the other two to work directly with data at scale.

He put these to work in a capstone project in his own field: he took supply-chain data from a public dataset on Kaggle and built a Power BI dashboard from it, analysing the data, drawing out insights, and presenting them clearly. The exercise taught him something more valuable than the tools themselves: how to turn data into a business decision. His advice to students preparing for placements is direct: build familiarity with Advanced Excel, Power BI, and SQL alongside your academic knowledge, because these are the skills that increasingly separate candidates.

Employers do not just want people who know the theory. They want people who can turn data into a decision.
– On what gets an MBA student placed

The Ola Electric selection ran in two familiar stages, a Group Discussion (GD) followed by a Personal Interview (PI), and Ritik’s experience is instructive for anyone facing the same. In the GD, around 15 candidates took part and roughly six advanced. His key insight: a group discussion is not simply about speaking the most. It is about demonstrating analytical thinking, aptitude, and the ability to communicate an idea clearly. Talking loudest is not the same as contributing best.

The personal interview turned on a practical scenario. The discussion touched on sales, where Ritik made a mature point that selling is not about pushing a product but about understanding a customer’s requirement and recommending what genuinely fits it. He was then asked a pointed situational question: when a customer visits a store, should sales or service take priority? He chose service, reasoning that an existing customer’s experience shapes how future customers perceive the business. That customer-first thinking is exactly the kind of judgement interviewers look for, and it helped carry him through.

What makes Ritik’s story more than a placement story is where he wants it to lead. His placement at Ola Electric, where he is currently in training for a role expected to involve managing a store and a service centre, is, in his own framing, a first step rather than a destination. His longer-term ambition is to start his own business in the FMCG sector after first gaining several years of real industry experience and learning how the business environment actually works.

This is exactly the mindset a good management education tries to build: not only the skills to secure a job but also the confidence and judgement to eventually create one. For students who think this way, Parul University’s PIERC startup ecosystem exists to support aspiring founders with mentoring, funding, and facilities, and the fundamentals of building a venture, from Validating an idea to designing a business model, are learnable long before you launch. A placement and an entrepreneurial dream are not in tension; for Ritik, the first is how he plans to earn his way to the second.

Asked what he would tell students coming up behind him, Ritik keeps it practical and grounded in what worked for him:

• Be consistent and disciplined – Work on technical knowledge and personality development in parallel.
• Build the tools employers want – Particularly Advanced Excel, Power BI, and SQL, alongside your coursework.
• Invest in communication and confidence – Because interviews test how you think and speak, not only what you know.
• Start placement preparation early – Not in the final stage of the degree, so you have time to build real skills.

It is advice that mirrors his own path and a reminder that placements reward preparation that begins long before the interview. Ritik also credits the guidance of supportive faculty at PIMR for steadying his journey along the way.