A lot of has been said and assumed about life at IITs. While Netflix’s latest docuseries, Alma Matters, gave us a peek into the life of students at IIT Kharagpur, we explored a little more to see what life at IITs, India’s premier engineering institutes is like.
Here’s what IITians have to say.
1. Every student at IIT Jodhpur is allotted a Single Air Cooled Room with LAN Port, Fan, Chair, Table, Almirah and a Bed. Hostels are also well connected through WiFi network. Each Hostel is equipped with Gym, TV Room, Reading Room, Garden, TT Room and a Music room. The walls of all the buildings are well insulated that you will never feel much warm inside. – Aman Kumar
2. Life in IIT was the perfect amalgamation of 3 things for me -– leveraging the power of self-learning, observing how people handle the vagaries of life chin up and winning friends & influencing people. Throughout these 4 years, I came across people from all the 29 states of the country, learnt a good amount of Oriya, Bengali, Telegu and Gujarati and marvelled at the sheer diversity of the country. For me, it was less about the curriculum syllabus and more about the people surrounding me and learning from them. – Tapobrata Behera
3. It’s pretty stressful. We’re bombarded with so many assignments and submissions that we have almost no time to do any extra thing that we are interested in. – Akash Tiwari
4. One just can’t have time for solitude. If one prefers to do so, he/she is a forgotten identity. You need to be active in at least something, be it academics or extra-curricular activities. Academics is tough, as simple as that. And competition is terrific. One just can’t hope to get good grades by studying 3-4 days before exams. – Sandipan Mitra
5. It’s perhaps the best life you can ever have in this country during education. There’s something magical in the IIT campus environment. There’s this aura of productivity and a collaborative spirit. You go to the library, or study in the room in a group, do informal project works. People offer you valuable inputs, you socialise in canteens & so on. Intellect is baked & challenges become part and parcel of everyday life. – Anurag Pradhan
6. I made friends from almost every corner of India. All festivals are celebrated with equal rigour. There are lot of cultural clubs that one can join like Dance, Music, Photography, Theatre. – Rucha Pankaj Trivedi
7. As far as competition is concerned, there is a hell lot of competition, I mean there were students in my class during 1st year who used to study topics weeks before the topic used to start in the class, so yeah in IITs you’ve to deal with such “maggus”. Well if you ask me about my story I’ll take days to tell you that, so in short, you will come out like a finely aged wine, well for me it happened like that. – Piyush Verma
8. In one word: Hectic. Does this mean we don’t like in here? NO. We love being here. Insti, as we fondly call our institute, gives us a lot more than what it takes. – Vinit Mehta
9. In IIT Varanasi, we wake up at 6.30 to attend the classes at 8.00 AM. There’s a lunch break in the noon time.The classes go on till 4 PM. If you wish to change branch, directly go to library and study. If not, enjoy the evening hours. The mess food is okay but needs improvement. You can explore various clubs here which offer a good value addition in your CV after 4 years. Overall the life is interesting here in IIT. – Aashay Kanade
10. It came as a shock to me that, yes, you still have to study after getting into IIT B. Life at IIT Bombay was good in the beginning, just a bunch of orientations you need to attend and there was no homework, of course. Gradually the weight increased. We were told we would have graded physics lab every week, graded mechanical workshops, and compulsory CS labs. – Arjun Kulshrestha
Did you expect these answers? If you have more to add about life at IITs, tell us in comments below.