He is not from IIT or BITS — India’s most vaunted engineering institutes — but he attended a strong university. He interviewed with an AI-focused company for an AI engineering internship, through a third-party recruiting agency. Three rounds, spread over roughly fifteen days.
He cleared the first two. The third required travelling to Bangalore for an in-office round. He was unsure about making that trip for an internship, so he asked the recruiter whether it could be done online. The recruiter said they had already rejected a few candidates who had asked for the same thing — but a few days later came back: the company had agreed.
He passed that round too. The interviewer told him the next step would be a project-based round, as the final stage. He was glad — it would mean working on something real.
Then weeks passed. He asked for an update. The recruiter said he had been rejected, because he was not from IIT or BITS. The agency, he added, was trying to persuade the company and was in talks with the CEO and founder, since after all those rounds they felt he should be hired. Another week went by. The final answer came: they would not hire him.
What galled him was the timing. This had not been a résumé-stage filter. He went through every round, reached the final project stage — and only then did the college he never attended become the deciding factor. Twenty days in the process, for a reason that had been true from the first day.