Indian Institute of Technology B.Tech Review By Siddhant Gautam

Established in 1951, IIT Kharagpur is the oldest IIT of all. It is among the top 5 IITs in India and has a QS rank of 314 worldwide as in 2021. It has various departments which cover all the fields of engineering quite extensively. To get into IIT Kharagpur you first need to qualify JEE MAINS and then get a rank among the top 7000 students. Owing to the diversity in the departments, you still hold a chance to get admission here which is not the case in many other older IITs. This is one of the premier institutes in India. Once you get in here, a lot of opportunities open up where you can follow your passion accordingly irrespective of your department. Since the campus is located in a very remote area in West Bengal, there is not much outside the campus due to which the students tend to explore their interests within the campus and choose their career path accordingly.

I am an undergraduate student enrolled in the institute's dual degree program offered by its Mechanical Engineering department with a specialization in Manufacturing. The academics in IITs are very hard. If you compare them to the other engineering colleges the difficulty levels are massively different. The course subjects are very much relevant and you also get flexibility with additional and micro-specializations in case your interests align with other subjects or departments. But that is down to the permissions of your department. In the institute, you would not be surprised to find people getting placed in companies or jobs outside their streams. People follow their passions over here be it in management, finance, coding, etc. I ended up in Product Management after an attempt at Entrepreneurship while being in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Rarely other colleges have such diversity.

The professors over here are not teachers. The main goal of the professors is research. If you take the projects under them accordingly, they would support you but very few professors are enthusiastic about teaching. The faculties are usually alumni of the college who further did researches in Ivy League colleges (PhDs/Post-Doc). Their knowledge of their fields is immense. But keep in mind, not all of them are friendly or cooperating. It depends on one professor to another. Still, their research is best in class with them winning international laurels regularly.

I was graduating at a time when corporate had been affected by the covid pandemic. Also, there is an expectation in society that IIT folks usually get packages in crores. Those who get such packages are with placement abroad who earn in dollars. And when that sum is converted to rupees, then it becomes crores. Be advised, that sum in the economy abroad is comparable to what they might get in the Indian economy. The average packages are Rs. 11-12 LPA but due to covid, it fell a bit. If you are in a circuital branch, (CS, EE, ECE, MA) your average would be a bit higher but that is more or less the average here. This time around at the end of phase 1 of placements approximately 45% of students were placed only. Usually, it is almost 75%. Big companies like Google, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, etc. came in for hiring along with startups like Groww, Navi, Udaan, etc. with positions in verticals varying from finance to product management to software to data science and whatnot.

The hostel of any IIT is pretty messed up. In particular for IIT Kharagpur, the hostels the very old with the infrastructure of the buildings from the 80s. Even when the alumni visit the campus, they find their hostels to be pretty much the same. The boys' and girls' hostels are separate. Since this is a residential college, the hostel becomes an integral part of your life and the mates whom you might make here tend to remain with you. Apart from that, the mess food as in all IITs is pathetic. There are no major food options available outside the campus as well. There are canteens almost in every hostel whose food is marginally better than the mess and very cheap. The room which you might get purely depends on your luck. Hostels are randomly allotted so you can get a single sharing room or even a triple sharing room.

The campus is the largest in the country with 200 acres of land. Since it is a residential campus, it has all the facilities available inside. The classrooms are still newer buildings as compared to the departments which are again very old. The campus has facilities for all the major sports with tennis courts, football and cricket grounds, basketball and volleyball courts, etc. The hospital inside the campus is very basic. They can treat minor issues but for anything major, you are usually referred to hospitals in Kolkata. Alongside all this, the USP of the place is its history. It was a concentration camp back in British rule and an airstrip during WW II. It still has the prison cells and a museum commemorating all the brave souls who laid their lives for the country over there. I doubt if any other college would have such a history in India.

This is the best part. During your stay since there is nothing on the outside, all you have is your campus life. Once can join various societies/cells where they can follow their passion. The same can be done even in the hostels during inter-hostel competitions. There is no concept of time over here, you can wander about on the campus with your friends whenever you like and follow whatever you want. There is a big difference in the personality of one when he enters the campus and when he leaves. The fests over here have different themes to them varying from cultural to tech and eve entrepreneurship summits. Each of them is one of the largest of their kind in India. Overall, the campus life was the best part of IIT Kharagpur. You learn from your peers only most of the time and the campus offers you a very encouraging and incorporating environment.