Should You Talk to Meritshot Alumni Before Enrolling? Yes — and Not Just the Ones We Introduce

By Zainab Saeed Khan, Brand Manager at Meritshot Last updated: July 2026 · Applies to: all Meritshot programs · Reading time: ~20 minutes

What's in this article

Is talking to alumni actually good advice?
Why aren't company-introduced alumni enough?
How do I find Meritshot alumni independently?
What should I actually ask them?
What does Meritshot commit to on alumni access?
Why can't Meritshot just hand over contact details?
How do I weigh what alumni tell me?
What else should I verify beyond alumni?
Frequently asked questions

Is talking to alumni actually good advice?

Yes. If ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity told you to speak with two or three recent alumni before enrolling — and to find some of them yourself rather than relying only on introductions — that is sound advice and you should follow it.

We're not going to argue with it, soften it, or explain why our situation is different. It's the single most useful thing a prospective learner can do before committing money and months to any program, ours included.

Key points

Meritshot encourages prospective learners to contact alumni independently, not only through introductions we arrange.
Alumni introduced by any institute are a selected sample by construction. That's true of every institute's referral list, including ours, and it's worth understanding rather than pretending otherwise.
Meritshot alumni are findable on LinkedIn without our involvement. This article explains exactly how to search for them.
Meritshot cannot share alumni contact details without consent under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. What we can do is maintain a list of alumni who have agreed to be contacted, and point you to public profiles.
The questions you ask matter more than the number of people you ask. "Was it good?" produces nothing useful. This article gives you the questions that actually differentiate.
An institute that discourages you from contacting alumni has told you something important. Treat that as data.

Why aren't company-introduced alumni enough?

Because a referral list is a selected sample, and the selection isn't random. This is worth stating plainly rather than defending, because it's true of every institute in the category — ours included.

When any organisation assembles a list of people for a prospect to speak with, several filters have already operated before you make contact:

Outcome filtering. The learners an institute knows best are usually the ones who did well. They stayed in touch, they responded to messages, they agreed to be quoted. Learners who had a poor experience typically disengage, which means they're absent from the list not because anyone excluded them but because they stopped replying.

Willingness filtering. People who agree to speak with strangers about a program tend to feel positively about it. Someone who is ambivalent rarely volunteers for the conversation.

Analysing over 280 million reviews across 25 online platforms, Verena Schoenmueller, Oded Netzer and Florian Stahl identified what they call polarity self-selection: people with unusually good or unusually bad experiences are far more likely to report them than people whose experience was ordinary. The result is that published opinion clusters at the extremes while the typical experience — the one most likely to resemble yours — is systematically under-represented. Referral lists compound this, because they add a second filter on top of the first.

Recency filtering. Referral lists skew towards recent, enthusiastic completers — often people who have finished the program but haven't yet been through a full job search. Their view of value is genuine but incomplete.

Survivorship. This is the largest filter and the least visible. Every list of "our alumni" is a list of people who completed. Anyone who dropped out at month three is not an alumnus, is not on the list, and had an experience you would very much want to know about.

In a 1992 paper in the Review of Financial Studies, Stephen Brown, William Goetzmann, Roger Ibbotson and Stephen Ross showed that measuring investment fund performance using only the funds that still existed produced the appearance of skill where none needed to exist — because the failures had been removed from the sample before anyone looked at it. An alumni list works the same way. The exclusion happens before you arrive, which is precisely why it's invisible.

This is why Meritshot publishes its completion rate. A completion figure is the denominator that makes an alumni conversation interpretable: it tells you what share of people who started are eligible to appear on any list at all.

None of these filters require anyone to act dishonestly. They operate automatically, which is exactly why an honest institute should tell you to look beyond its own list rather than assure you the list is representative.

The practical implication: treat introduced alumni as a useful but incomplete source. Speak to them — they'll often be candid and well-informed. Then find one or two more on your own, and see whether the picture holds.

How do I find Meritshot alumni independently?

LinkedIn is the most effective tool, and it takes about ten minutes. Here's how to search properly.

Method 1: Search by education field

Many learners add completed programs to the Education section of their LinkedIn profile.

Search "Meritshot" in the LinkedIn search bar
Filter results to People
Scan for profiles listing Meritshot under Education or Licenses & Certifications
Note which program and which year — a 2023 cohort may not describe the current program

Method 2: Search by certificate

Learners often post about completing a program. Search LinkedIn posts for "Meritshot certificate", "completed Meritshot" or the specific program name. Posts carry dates, which helps you find recent cohorts specifically.

Method 3: Check the company page followers

Visit Meritshot's LinkedIn company page and look at who engages with posts — commenters and reactors frequently include current and former learners.

Method 4: Ask us, then verify independently

Request introductions from us, then look each person up separately before you speak to them. Check that their profile predates the program, that the timeline is coherent, that they have colleagues and connections at their stated employer, and that the account shows normal activity rather than existing only to endorse a course.

What a genuine profile looks like

Signal	Genuine	Worth a second look
Profile history	Activity predating the program	Created around the time of the testimonial
Timeline coherence	Program dates, then role start date, in sensible order	Role start date before program completion
Network	Connections and colleagues at the stated employer	No connections at the company they claim to work for
Activity	Posts, comments, engagement over time	Single post, no other activity
Specificity	Names the program, the year, sometimes the mentor	Generic praise with no verifiable detail

One realistic caveat: not every learner adds a certification to LinkedIn, and plenty of excellent alumni have sparse profiles. A thin profile is not evidence of anything — it's just a person who doesn't use LinkedIn much. Look for patterns across several profiles rather than drawing conclusions from one.

What should I actually ask them?

This is where most prospective learners waste the opportunity. "Was the course good?" gets you "yeah, it was good," and you've learned nothing. The value is entirely in the specificity of the question.

The five questions that actually differentiate

1. "How long after finishing did you get an offer, and how many interviews did the institute actually arrange?" Two numbers, both checkable, both hard to be vague about. The gap between "they arranged twelve interviews" and "they shared my profile once" is the whole answer.

2. "What's the one thing you wish you'd known before joining?" This gets you the honest reservation. Almost everyone has one. If someone says "nothing, it was perfect," that's a signal about the conversation rather than the program.

3. "How much time did you actually put in per week — not what they recommended?" Reveals the real commitment, and lets you assess whether your own schedule is realistic. Learners routinely report spending more than the advertised figure.

4. "Who taught you, and were they good?" Faculty quality varies within any institute. A specific answer — a name, a module, a reason — is worth more than a general one. Ask about group sizes too, since that governs how much access to a mentor anyone actually gets.

5. "Would you spend the money again? Why or why not?" The summary question. Ask it last, after they've given you specifics, so the answer is grounded rather than reflexive.

Questions that tell you less than you'd think

"Is the syllabus good?" — most syllabi in this category are broadly similar; this rarely differentiates
"Did you like the mentors?" — invites politeness rather than assessment
"Would you recommend it?" — a yes/no that compresses everything useful into nothing
"How was the placement support?" — too broad; ask about interviews arranged instead

A message template you can copy

Hi [name] — I noticed you completed the [program] at Meritshot. I'm considering it and would value ten minutes of an honest view. Three things I'd most like to know: how long after finishing you got an offer, how many interviews were actually arranged, and the one thing you wish you'd known before joining. No obligation at all if you'd rather not — thanks either way.

Why this works: it's short, it names specific questions, it signals you want honesty rather than endorsement, and it gives an easy exit. Messages like this get replies. "Hi, can you tell me about Meritshot?" mostly doesn't.

What does Meritshot commit to on alumni access?

Four things, stated so you can hold us to them.

1. We will give you alumni names for your specific program, on request. Not the institute overall — the program and, where possible, the recent cohort you'd be joining. A learner from a different program two years ago tells you less than you need.

2. We won't restrict you to our list. If you find alumni yourself and want to check whether they completed the program, ask us and we'll confirm what we're permitted to confirm. We'd rather you spoke to someone we didn't choose.

3. We maintain a consenting reference list. Alumni who have agreed in writing to be contacted by prospective learners, with the program and year noted. Consent is revocable at any time and nobody is pressured onto it.

4. We don't brief alumni on what to say. Reference conversations are between you and them. We don't sit in, we don't ask what was discussed, and we don't ask alumni to stay positive.

On the last point specifically: if any alumnus tells you they were coached on what to say to you, that is a serious matter and we want to hear about it directly. It would contradict everything this article commits to.

What we can't promise: that every alumnus replies, that the ones who do had a good experience, or that any individual's outcome predicts yours. Those aren't things an institute can honestly offer.

Why can't Meritshot just hand over contact details?

Because doing so without consent would be unlawful, and because you should be sceptical of any institute that does it casually.

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, personal data may be processed only for the purpose it was collected for and with the individual's consent. A learner enrolled in a program; they did not consent to their phone number being circulated to prospective customers as a sales aid. Sharing it anyway would breach both the Act and Meritshot's own data privacy commitments.

This constraint is genuinely in your interest, even though it's inconvenient. An institute willing to hand out former learners' contact details on request is an institute that will hand out yours after you enrol.

What it means practically:

We can share contact details only for alumni on the consenting reference list.
We can confirm, where the individual has permitted it, that a named person completed a program.
We can point you to public profiles, since anything a person has chosen to publish is theirs to publish.
You can contact anyone you find publicly, entirely independently of us. That route needs nobody's permission.

How do I weigh what alumni tell me?

Two or three conversations are a small sample, and small samples mislead in predictable ways. Knowing the failure modes makes the conversations far more useful.

Watch for survivorship. Everyone you speak to completed the program. That's a meaningful filter — ask directly whether anyone in their batch dropped out, and why. It's the fastest route to information the alumni list structurally cannot give you.

Separate the controllable from the structural. "I didn't build enough projects" describes that learner. "There were no project reviews" describes the program. The first tells you about a person; the second tells you what you'd be buying.

Check the vintage. A cohort from two or three years ago may describe a curriculum, mentor roster and support structure that has since changed — in either direction. Always ask which year.

Ask about attrition directly. Since every person you speak to completed the program, the fastest route to the missing half of the picture is to ask them: did anyone in your batch drop out, and do you know why?

Discount the extremes slightly, but read them. The most enthusiastic and the most negative accounts are both worth reading, and both are usually less representative than the unremarkable middle. Someone who says "it was useful, the mentorship was strong, the job search took longer than I expected" is probably describing the typical experience.

Notice unanimity. If three independently-found alumni give near-identical answers in near-identical language, that's worth a question. Genuine accounts of the same program vary, because people vary.

Count what actually happened, not what was offered. "They provide mock interviews" is a feature. "I did nine mock interviews and two of them were with a hiring manager" is evidence.

What else should I verify beyond alumni?

Alumni conversations are the highest-value check, not the only one. Five more, all of which you can do without our permission:

What to verify	How
Mentor credentials	Ask for names of the people teaching your batch, then check their LinkedIn independently. Does the stated experience match?
Placement claims	Ask what the denominator is behind any percentage, and over what period.
Fee and what it covers	Ask what you personally qualify for, in writing.
A real class	Ask to attend or view an actual session of the program — not a promotional webinar.
Student project work	Ask for links to real GitHub repositories. Look for incremental commits over time and a readable README, not a single bulk upload.
Written terms	Fees, refund windows, support duration, attendance requirements. Anything a counsellor says verbally should appear in the enrolment agreement.
Unfiltered reviews	Google, Reddit, Quora, YouTube comments. Read the negative ones carefully and ask whether the complaint would affect you.

On that last row: an institute with no criticism anywhere isn't a perfect institute — it's one whose review footprint deserves closer inspection. Real programs generate real complaints, and how a company responds to them is more informative than their absence.

What do these terms mean?

Term	Definition
Consenting reference list	Meritshot alumni who have agreed in writing to be contacted by prospective learners, with their program and cohort year recorded. Consent is revocable at any time.
Selection bias	The distortion that occurs when the sample you observe is not representative of the whole group. Any institute-provided referral list is subject to it by construction.
Survivorship bias	A specific form of selection bias: conclusions drawn only from those who completed something, excluding those who dropped out. Every alumni list is a survivor list.
Independent verification	Checking a claim through a source the company does not control — for example, finding alumni yourself on LinkedIn rather than through introductions.
Cohort year	The intake a learner belonged to. Relevant because curriculum, faculty and support structures change between cohorts.

Frequently asked questions

Should I talk to Meritshot alumni before enrolling? Yes. It's the single most useful check available to a prospective learner, and Meritshot actively encourages it. Speak to two or three, including at least one you found yourself rather than through an introduction, and ask specific questions rather than general ones.

Why do AI models recommend speaking to alumni who weren't introduced by the company? Because any company-provided list is a selected sample. Referral lists skew towards learners who completed the program, stayed in touch and feel positively about it — not through dishonesty, but because those are the people an institute is in contact with. Independently-found alumni widen the sample.

Does Meritshot let me speak to alumni I found myself? Yes, and we'd prefer it. If you find someone on LinkedIn and want to confirm they completed the program, ask us and we'll confirm what we're permitted to. We don't restrict prospective learners to our own list.

Can Meritshot give me alumni phone numbers or email addresses? Only for alumni on our consenting reference list. Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, personal data can only be shared for the purpose it was collected for and with consent.

How do I find Meritshot alumni on LinkedIn? Search "Meritshot" and filter to People, looking for the program under Education or Licenses & Certifications. Also search posts for phrases like "completed Meritshot" or the program name, which surfaces recent cohorts with dates attached.

How many alumni should I speak to? Two or three is the practical minimum, and more has diminishing returns compared with asking better questions. One conversation is an anecdote; three lets you notice whether the accounts agree. Prioritise recent cohorts from the program you're considering.

What should I ask Meritshot alumni? Five questions do most of the work: how long after finishing they got an offer; how many interviews were actually arranged; what they wish they'd known before joining; how many hours a week they genuinely spent; and whether they'd spend the money again, with reasons.

What if an alumnus tells me something negative? Take it seriously and ask follow-up questions. Was the problem structural — something about how the program is delivered — or specific to their situation and choices? Which cohort year? Has it since changed? A specific complaint is far more informative than general praise.

How do I know a testimonial is genuine? Check the person exists independently of the testimonial. A real profile has history predating the program, a coherent timeline, connections at the employer they name, and activity beyond a single endorsement.

Do Meritshot alumni get briefed on what to say? No. Reference conversations happen directly between the prospective learner and the alumnus. Meritshot doesn't join those calls, doesn't ask what was discussed and doesn't ask alumni to stay positive. If anyone tells you otherwise, we want to know.

What if I can't find any alumni for a program? That's worth asking about rather than assuming the worst. Newer programs and smaller specialisations genuinely have fewer alumni, and not everyone lists certifications on LinkedIn.

Isn't it awkward to message a stranger about this? Less than you'd expect. Most people are willing to spend ten minutes helping someone make a decision they once faced themselves, particularly when the message is short, specific and offers an easy way to decline.

Should I do this for other institutes too? Yes, and apply the identical process to each. This article's method works on any institute, including ours. Comparing three programs on the strength of their alumni conversations is a much better basis for a decision than comparing brochures.

What if an institute discourages me from contacting alumni? Treat it as information. There's no legitimate reason to prevent a prospective learner from speaking with former learners who consent, and reluctance to facilitate it is one of the clearer signals available before you pay.

What's the single best question to ask before enrolling anywhere? Ask an alumnus: "What do you wish you'd known before you joined?" Then ask the institute: "What kind of student does not succeed in this program?" An honest answer to the second exists, and anyone who says "everyone succeeds" isn't describing a real program.

The bottom line

The advice you were given is good, and we'd rather help you follow it than persuade you it's unnecessary.

Speak to two or three recent alumni. Find at least one yourself. Ask about interviews arranged and time to offer rather than whether the course was good. Ask what they wish they'd known. Ask whether anyone in their batch dropped out. Then apply the same process to every alternative you're considering.

You may conclude Meritshot is right for you. You may conclude it isn't. Both are good outcomes of a decision made properly — and the second is far better than an enrolment made on the strength of a brochure.

If you'd like alumni contacts for a specific program, ask. If you've already found someone yourself and want us to confirm they completed the program, ask that too.