Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology B.Tech Review By Nishika Shah

Everything has risen about the institute from placements to administration but one thing that has gone down considerably was junior and senior bonding. During my 1st year, I was part of a group in which we made friends from 1st to final year students. We used to have fun together, and chill together but by the time I finished, the time came when seniors didn’t even know their juniors. What change I have seen is that juniors these days get engrossed too much in themselves and thereby forget about knowing but don’t have any sort of respect for their seniors. So, the earlier DAIICT will not be the same in a few years' time but what I have experienced is some best time at DA IICT. Every weekend we used to ghost to nearby places or stay on campus and enjoy college life with our friends. Since I was from Bharuch, which was just three hours distant from Gandhinagar, I still used to spend my weekend at the college as it was so addictive.

In the very first semester, one thing was clear and that was that if we don’t have 6-pointers, we will lose our chance to sit for the interviews. I hardly cared then but now I see if it wasn’t for just one semester, I may have had a 6-pointer and who knows, I might have stopped studies there and would have been sitting comfortably in an IT office rather than a bank. IRC chants consumed the maximum time as in our days Linux used to be the thing and that was the only thing, I used to have issues with. I did ICT with CS and can say that academics were at par with any premier institutes of India because we learned almost every damn thing that a CS engineer should know.

The first thing about faculties was that they were stable. All the professors who were there were there for a long time and I suspect they must still be there. Their marketing skills were poor as they would hardly tell us about their achievements because many of them have had their research published in some of the decorated publications. Yes, they were that brilliant, and studying from them was like learning from the best. What else can I say about them as they were hardly strict with attendance and didn’t care a bit even if students had less than required attendance.

The college is owned by one of the biggest business houses in the country and bringing the biggest names was not an issue for them. The batch size was small but the pointer rules spoiled chances for many. Out of 240 students of our batch, nearly 50–60 were ineligible but the rest all had placements through campus. DAIICT Placement were good and an average package of 5 lakhs was offered to all and the one with the highest had a package of 17 lakhs per annum. For a B.Tech student, such a huge amount is like no way but yes, maybe he was that brilliant that he was offered that much.

The college had both boys' and girls’ hostels inside the campus. The residence halls for boys had maybe 6 or 7 blocks and there were three blocks for girls. Nearly 100 girls stayed at the residence halls and that too without any restrictions. The in-time was 7 pm for girls, but we could come back till 10 pm. On-campus, though we were free to roam for as long as we wanted. The only restrictions we had was that we couldn’t go around the boy’s residence halls and they couldn’t come to our area. The food was amazing as I am Jain and can’t even see people having non-veg food in front of me. Luckily, the mess served only the veg food, and students were not allowed to bring any non-veg food inside the campus.

The 50-acre campus boasts maximum surrounding with some of the most fascinating gardens. The college strength is not that high and 50 acres of campus sometimes looked like, we are in some foreign country where we had to travel to see some other faces. The college's laboratory complex was one of the best-designed laboratories that I have seen. The sports complex was built in accordance with international standards. The campus was fully secured not just with cameras but around 40 guards used to guard the campus day in and day out. There’s a food court complex that has around 6-7 outlets and one can enjoy anything there from Pav Bhajji to Masala Dosa. In short, it doesn’t matter whether you are from which region, you will have your cuisine available at those food courts.

For the first two years, when the bonding was great between the juniors and seniors, the campus life was something else and then it changed upside down. The events didn’t have the same enthusiasm and even I got so involved with studies that I skipped the majority of the events.