The 30-Day Service Company Preparation Plan: Day-by-Day Schedule for TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant

Placement season is 30 days away. Your campus has confirmed that TCS, Infosys, and Wipro are visiting. Your placement cell has handed you a syllabus document that lists 47 topics across quantitative aptitude, logical reasoning, verbal ability, and technical subjects. You have approximately 120 hours of preparation time if you study 4 hours per day alongside your regular coursework. The standard advice — "cover everything" — guarantees that you cover nothing well enough to pass. This is the precise day-by-day schedule that maximizes your probability of clearing the written round at all four major service recruiters, based on the actual question patterns and cutoffs from the 2024–2025 placement cycle.

Days 1–10: Aptitude Foundation

The aptitude section at service companies tests three categories. The time allocation below reflects both the weight of each category on the exam and the rate at which practice produces improvement. Quantitative aptitude has the highest weight and the steepest improvement curve — an hour of practice produces more score gain in quant than in any other section.

Days 1–4: Quantitative Aptitude. Focus on the 8 topics that appear on every service company test: percentages, profit and loss, ratios and proportions, time and work, time-speed-distance, simple and compound interest, averages, and number systems. Do not study theory first. Solve problems immediately. For each topic: read one solved example to understand the pattern, then solve 20 problems without looking at solutions. After solving, review the ones you got wrong and identify the specific arithmetic operation you misapplied. The goal is to identify your error patterns, not to solve every problem correctly on the first attempt.

Days 5–7: Logical Reasoning. Focus on the 5 recurring problem types: seating arrangements (linear and circular), blood relations, syllogisms, coding-decoding, and data sufficiency. Logical reasoning problems are pattern-driven. Once you solve 10 seating arrangement problems, you will recognize the template and solve the next 10 in half the time. The key skill is translating the English description into a diagram or table. Practice this translation step separately: for each problem, spend 60 seconds drawing the initial diagram before attempting to answer any questions. Most errors in logical reasoning come from incorrect diagram setup, not from logical mistakes in reasoning from the correct diagram.

Days 8–10: Verbal Ability. Service company verbal sections test reading comprehension, sentence correction, and vocabulary (synonyms/antonyms). Reading comprehension carries the highest weight. Practice by reading one 400–500 word passage per day and answering 5 questions in 8 minutes. The strategy for RC: read the questions first, then read the passage looking for the specific lines that answer each question. Do not read the passage for general understanding — read it to locate answers to specific questions. For sentence correction, the most common error types in service company tests are subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, and modifier placement. Focus on these three and ignore the rarer error types until you are scoring above 85% on these.

Days 11–20: Coding Preparation

Service company coding rounds use compiler-based automated evaluation. Your code must compile, run, and pass hidden test cases. The evaluation does not care about code quality, variable names, or comments. It cares about correct output for every hidden input. This changes how you prepare: you must practice writing code that handles edge cases you cannot see.

Days 11–14: Patterns 1 and 2 (Array Traversal, Hash Maps). These two patterns cover approximately 55% of service company coding questions. Write code in a plain text editor without autocomplete. For each problem: write the function signature, add guard clauses for empty and single-element inputs, write the core logic, test manually against edge cases, then submit. After submitting, review any failures and add the missing guard clause to your mental checklist. Build a personal edge-case checklist that grows with each failure: empty array, single element, negative numbers, duplicate values, large inputs causing timeout.

Days 15–17: Patterns 3 and 4 (Two-Pointer, String Manipulation). Two-pointer and sliding window problems are the most difficult in the service company pool. Start with fixed-size window problems (maximum sum subarray of size K) before attempting variable-size windows. For string manipulation: master the core operations — split, join, substring, replace, and regex-based matching for patterns like email validation or phone number extraction.

Days 18–20: Patterns 5 and 6 (Sorting+Logic, Basic Math). Sorting problems are straightforward once you recognize that sorting transforms the problem. If the problem asks for "minimum number of X" or "merge overlapping Y," sort first and then apply a single-pass algorithm. For math problems: memorize the Sieve of Eratosthenes (primes up to N) and Euclidean algorithm (GCD). These two algorithms cover every math problem that appears in service company coding rounds.

Days 21–27: Bridging Skills

Days 21–22: SQL. The technical interview at service companies tests basic SQL. You need to be able to write SELECT with WHERE, GROUP BY with HAVING, and JOIN across two tables. Practice on an actual database (install PostgreSQL locally, create tables, insert data, and run queries). Solving SQL problems on paper is not the same as writing queries that execute against a real database. The syntax errors you make on paper become obvious when the query fails to run. Practice with real execution.

Days 23–24: Communication and Group Discussion. Service company group discussions follow a predictable format: the panel gives a topic (usually a current affairs or abstract topic like "Is social media making us less social?"), and each candidate speaks for 2–3 minutes. The evaluation criteria: clarity of thought, ability to structure an argument (opening statement → 2–3 supporting points → conclusion), and English fluency. Practice with a timer. Record yourself speaking on 5 random topics. Listen to the recording. You will notice filler words ("um," "like," "basically") that you were not aware of. Eliminate them. The difference between a candidate who sounds prepared and one who does not often comes down to filler-word elimination.

Days 25–27: Resume Audit and Mock Interviews. Audit your resume against the checklist from our [tier-3 resume anatomy guide](/blog/anatomy-tier3-placement-resume). Then do two mock technical interviews with a friend: one person asks standard service company interview questions ("What is a primary key?" "Explain OOP concepts with examples." "Write a program to check if a string is a palindrome."), the other answers. Switch roles. Recording these sessions reveals gaps in your knowledge that reading alone does not expose.

Days 28–30: Mock Tests, Review, Rest

Day 28: Full mock test 1. Simulate exact test conditions. No phone. No internet. No looking up answers. Set a timer for each section and stop when the timer ends, even if you have not finished. Score yourself. Identify your weakest section. Spend the afternoon reviewing only that section.

Day 29: Full mock test 2. Same conditions. Your score should be higher than mock 1 because you reviewed your weakest area. If your score did not improve, the issue is test-taking strategy (time management, panic, misreading questions), not knowledge gaps. Focus on strategy adjustments: read the question twice before answering, skip questions that take more than 60 seconds, and return to them if time permits.

Day 30: Rest. Do not study. Do not solve problems. Do not read notes. Your brain consolidates learning during rest. Light review of your one-page formula sheet is acceptable. Exercise, eat well, and sleep 8+ hours. A well-rested brain performs significantly better on cognitive tasks than a fatigued brain that studied an extra three hours the night before.