Skipping Campus Placements Was the Best Decision of My Life

If you’re in college right now, you’ve probably been told that campus placement is the safe path. Here’s why I walked away from it.

In my third year of college, I made a call that a lot of people around me thought was risky: I skipped campus placements completely. Looking back, it’s the best decision I’ve made so far.

The reason was simple. I believe everyone should bet on themselves instead of letting campus placement decide how far they can go.

Why I didn’t want to go the placement route

The process is a lottery as much as a test. Campus placement means going through the standard route: aptitude tests, multiple-choice rounds, a bunch of DSA rounds, and interview after interview. You can prepare well and still miss out because of one bad round or the wrong company showing up that year. A lot of it comes down to luck.

The opportunities are limited. On campus, you only get to choose from the companies that visit your college. You usually won’t get the role or the package you actually deserve. Outside, nothing stops you from going after the exact thing you want.

When I decided to skip placements, I didn’t have an offer in hand. Nothing was guaranteed. But I’d built up real confidence in my skills, and I’d made a lot of connections through open source and the work I was putting out there. So I chose to stop following the default path and do things my own way.

What I actually did

Built projects. This is where my confidence came from. Shipping real things teaches you more than any placement prep.

Contributed to open source. This expanded my network globally. People got to know me through my work, not my college name.

Built a public presence on X. Sharing what I was learning and building opened doors I never would have found otherwise.

These were the things that actually mattered.

Around October 2025, I stopped going to college and went all in on my own work. In January 2026, I formally opted out of campus placements. In February, I landed my first internship at Mastra, a YC-backed startup, and in April I joined full-time.

If you’re still in college

Bet on yourself. Treat campus placement as your last option, not your first.

Placement makes sense if you haven’t prepared and need a safety net at the last moment. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’ve been working hard since your early years, you deserve to go after what you really want, not just what shows up on campus.

In the end, it depends on you, your situation, and your skills. Just make the choice consciously instead of by default.

X: @ojhaverse23

GitHub: intojhanurag