Some useful suggestions :

1.Try to read the lecture notes after going back to hostel if possible immediately after the class, in this way you will absorb the concepts very fast and lay your hands on the machine, do experiments with programs and try to learn new things on your own. If possible get the previous placement papers available at 'Navya' server and try to test your skills on one question paper at a time by keeping time limit as well, which will help you to assess your capability ( concentrate more on the papers of companies in which u want to be likely placed )

2.Please don't miss lectures and tutorials because they will cover both concepts and applications for the placements. I think the lecture notes given in the class is more than sufficient for the C language and try to go through Kernighan and Ritchie whenever you have any doubts. I also recommend another book " Programming with C - Byron Gottfried, Schaumm's Outline Series " which is very well written and most widely used book in world.

3.Most of the students have not worked on the question paper space to solve the questions instead they have done calculations on the fly in their mind. Please try to avoid it, even best of the programmers can do silly mistakes in over confidence. Try to use paper and pencil to work out the program by tracking the various variables just like the way i do in the class.

4.Most of the students were unable to manage their time for the exam, as i observed during the invigilation. A Placement written test is as good as any other competitive exam which can be framed as an optimization problem as below :

Maximize : Total marks

Subject to constraints : 1. Time_taken <= Duration of exam 2. Errors <= epsilon ( which is very small )

U don't need  a Operations research technique like Simplex method to solve this optimization problem, instead you require simple commonsense and strong basics of the concepts. Before answering the question paper, please try to read entire question paper once, by doing this you will know the level of the question paper. Every question has equal weight-age and make a note that you don't get extra credit for solving harder problems. So try to finish off easy questions first and then try to solve difficult questions iteratively one after another. According to the principle of relative grading, its not important how much you have performed rather more important thing is how better you have performed compared to your neighbour. So don't do mistakes in easy questions which will be solved by everyone any how and try to solve as many difficult problems as you can which will help you to always be in a safe position.

5.Try to improve your communication skills also, its not only technical knowledge which matters in placements, this factor also plays a very important role either in HR interview or technical interview. You should be in a position to sell yourself better in the present market :) .. Also practice puzzles which is most common in almost all the written tests or interviews. 

6. I should go for a core job or a software job ???? ( non-CS only )

   If you have a choice of going for core job or software job, please prefer the former one. This is just my opinion, and you can always go for your choice. Let me support my view, with some pros and cons of both. People normally tend to be more inclined towards the software job because of the huge salaries they get, there is no doubt in it, its absolutely true. But the disadvantage is there is an equal amount of workload, pressures from your boss, professionalism etc.. which will make your life very difficult. What is the use of earning so much, if you don't have the time to enjoy that money and lacking mental peace is something to be considered. Mental peace is one thing which is very important in everyone's life. If you like coding, testing, finding bugs and fixing the bugs etc.. then its fine but if you don't sooner you will not enjoy your work and life. Working for 5 days 12 hours a day, Saturday going to take rest, Sunday is one day where u will get sometime but most of the times it happens that you will have some pending work in the week days and are forced to work even on the weekends to compensate and meet the expectations from your boss and when you have product delivery deadlines it is still worst you may have to work the whole week continuously in the late nights as well. Money is not all that is important in life there many beautiful things in life other than it.  Because life is very short and there are many more beautiful things in life which need to be enjoyed at a particular period in the life cycle right , so you will be missing them all. You can reuse space but not time!!    

I hope all of you will perform very good in the upcoming placements and get very good jobs. All the very best.