Engineering colleges in India fail to groom your personality: Arghya Sinha

Well, when it comes to choosing the right college or university, a student is required to rate a lot of things. I might help you guys with my method of selecting the college.

So, when you are choosing a college, ask yourself what kind of experience you want to gain from this stage of your life. Believe me, we all are ready to answer this question as we have cleared two of the toughest exams which are Boards, and have a little bit of clear perception of who we want to be.

When this decision was vested upon me, I chose to become an engineer. According to me, it is the perfect combination of conceptualisation of theory and practical knowledge to validate that theory. People say it’s not a flourishing field, it used to be so before recession and all. But believe me, that’s not a case here.

Let’s talk in terms of statistics. If you want to colonialize a place with a population of just 100 people in it, it will require you to have at least 20 engineers. 20% of the population needs to be educated to establish the colony. (No offence to other fields but the above observation is completely based on my view point.)

With a growing number of colleges in this field, there are a lot of options a student might choose from, based on his goals and requirements.

How I chose my college

I appeared for all the exams like IIT JEE (now JEE Advanced), BITSAT, VITEEE, etc. but my plan was always to move abroad to complete my education. With the rising fee structure, I chose to live near my home as I found it to be comfortable. I think to gain knowledge and put up the foundation of career, one must be relaxed and free to the extent that he/she can experiment with his/her likes and dislikes towards the subjects provided by the system.

College helps you groom your intrapersonal skills, though I agree that in our country, engineering colleges fail to do so in a lot of aspects. But these skills are something that even the students have to work upon and build up the courage to develop these particular skills, which are very important.

Well, I chose SAL Technical Campus as my college as it had the perfect combination of what I wanted. The faculty members of some subjects were brilliant and some of them weren’t. The curriculum was centralised by GTU, so that provided us with a proper evaluation of our knowledge to an extent throughout the semesters.

College life

My college was not as strict with maintaining the attendance, which is not good. But at the same time, if you are someone like me, it’s just great because it provides you with an opportunity to learn things from the outside world. The engineering field is constantly changing. Something new is being discovered in every six months. And friends, it is out of colleges’ capabilities to provide the infrastructure required to nurture our curious minds. So, I decided to invest my time in learning various computer languages from outside.

As I am an electrical and electronics engineer, computer subject isn’t there in my syllabus. Now, people might wonder why I did not take computer science itself. Well, with my marks, I could have easily got computer science but I chose not to, because everyone was doing it and they had zero knowledge whatsoever to build the hardware. The subject I chose was a hybrid. So, I got the best of both worlds and took the subjects I liked. As I was always curious about AI technology and I had checked it out beforehand, when we had this subject in our final semester, it helped me build myself in the direction in which I wanted to grow.

You must have thought in school and college that we have different teachers teaching different subjects, but they want us to study all the subjects at once. And so, I have asked this question to my teachers quite a few times but the most satisfying answer I got was from one of the school teachers. She said “We are not required to excel at every task we are given, it’s okay to be average in some subjects. You need to prioritize the time at hand to make sure that you pass in all subjects and score well in the subjects that you enjoy studying.”

See, knowledge is out there in form of books, videos, internet, etc. How we capture it, digest it, and apply it to grow in a positive direction is up to us.

I just got my engineering degree. I topped my class with a CGPA of 9.24 and even got a place as an analyst for data sciences and development of AI in a company client to Microsoft.

About the Author:

My name is Arghya Sinha and I am 22 years old. I pursued my BTech in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from SAL Engineering and Technical Institute. Besides being a car enthusiast, I love reading writing, debating, painting, performing, reading novels, gaming, etc.