The 90-Day Placement Preparation Plan (That Assumes You Have Classes Too)
Most placement plans you’ll find online assume you have eight free hours a day. You don’t. You have classes, assignments, maybe a backlog, and a phone full of distractions. So here’s a plan built for 90 minutes a day, six days a week — about 70 hours total. That’s enough, if you spend it on the right things.
The plan below is deliberately boring. Placement prep isn’t won by finding a secret resource. It’s won by covering four areas without abandoning any of them halfway.
The four areas (and why each one matters)
Almost every fresher hiring process is some combination of:
- Aptitude — quantitative, logical reasoning, verbal. This is the filter. It’s also the most learnable part, because the question types repeat.
- Coding / DSA — from “reverse a string” at service companies to real algorithmic work at product companies.
- CS fundamentals — OS, DBMS, CN, OOP. This is what interviews actually dig into, and what most people skip.
- Communication — the HR round, and the ability to explain what you built.
The failure mode is spending all 90 days on one of them. People who love coding grind DSA and get filtered out by an aptitude cutoff they could have cleared in three weeks. People who fear coding do aptitude forever and then freeze in the technical round.
Month 1 — Aptitude, and the habit
Goal: clear any aptitude cutoff.
Aptitude has the highest return per hour of anything in this list, because the topic list is finite and the questions are patterned. Percentages, ratios, time and work, time speed distance, permutations, probability, number system, and the reasoning family.
Do one topic at a time, and do it to the point of boredom. The mark of “done” isn’t that you understand the topic — it’s that you can see the question type and know the approach before you finish reading.
- Start with percentages — it’s the base for profit and loss, interest, and data interpretation. Getting it fast makes three later topics faster.
- Then work through company-pattern practice sets once you have a few topics down.
Also in month 1: fix the habit. Same time every day. The single best predictor of whether someone is placed is not their CGPA or their college — it’s whether they were still practising in week 9.
Month 2 — DSA and CS core, together
Goal: solve a medium problem without panicking, and explain a page-table without googling.
Split the 90 minutes: 60 on DSA, 30 on fundamentals.
For DSA, follow one structured path instead of random problems. Arrays and strings, then hashing, then two pointers and sliding window, then recursion, then trees, then graphs, then DP — in that order, because each one leans on the previous. Our DSA course is free and follows exactly this sequence with written notes per lesson.
The rule that matters: write the code, don’t read the solution. Reading a solution feels like learning and isn’t. If you’re stuck for 30 minutes, then read it — and then close it and write it from memory the next day.
For fundamentals, 30 minutes a day is plenty if you’re consistent. Operating systems, DBMS and computer networks — the same twenty-odd concepts come up again and again: processes vs threads, deadlock, paging, normalization, indexing, ACID, the TCP handshake, what happens when you type a URL.
Know Big-O cold by the end of this month. It comes up in nearly every technical interview, and it’s a 20-minute concept that people somehow carry vagueness about for years.
Month 3 — Company patterns, mocks, and the story
Goal: be boring and reliable under exam conditions.
Now you specialise. Pick the companies actually visiting your campus, or the off-campus drives you’ll apply to, and practise their pattern specifically. TCS, Infosys and Wipro all have distinguishable styles, and practising the right one is worth more than another hundred random questions.
Alongside that:
- Do timed sets. Untimed practice hides your real problem, which is usually pacing, not knowledge.
- Prepare your projects. You will be asked “explain your project” and the honest answer to “why did you use X?” is more impressive than a rehearsed one.
- Keep the jobs board open. Off-campus deadlines are real and they don’t wait for you to feel ready. Nobody feels ready.
How to tell it’s working
Not by how you feel. Feelings lie in both directions during placement season.
Track two things: your accuracy on first attempt (are you getting questions right the first time you see them, not the third?) and your coverage (how much of a bank have you actually finished?). Your dashboard tracks both automatically as you practise, including which topics you keep missing.
If your accuracy on a topic isn’t moving after a week, you don’t have a practice problem — you have an understanding problem. Go back to the notes for that topic instead of doing more questions.
The honest part
Ninety days of 90 minutes will get most people through the aptitude and technical rounds of most service companies. It will not turn you into a competitive programmer, and it won’t fix a resume with nothing on it.
But it’s enough — and it’s dramatically more than the median candidate does, because the median candidate starts in week 10 and does eight hours a day for a week. That doesn’t work. This does.
Start today, even badly. Pick a topic and do 20 minutes.