Engineering College Life: What Could Be Better?

They say college days are some of the best in your life. You get freed of restrictions at home; now that you are taking your steps to becoming an adult, you are allowed be all of your own self than your parents' kiddie. College is no more a burden of exams or competitions. Friends regard you cool if you don't care about the classroom topics, or if you walked away from the class because the lecturer found you guilty of not paying attention. You bother the least about maintaining a good student impression anymore. You become a star if you pranked or teased the lecturer during a class without being noticed. When you start exploring yourself, college gives you numerous adventures and delightful moments.

Studies are short-lived before the exams. People consider you as boring if you study everyday, try to understand lectures in class, respond to questions, ask the lecturer for clarifications or spend time in the library. Technically, your boringness-index increases proportionately with the frequency and duration of your display of those qualities. People often ask you, “do you keep studying all day?” “Why are you reading a book that is not even prescribed?” If you are among these nerds, you become suddenly famous during the night before the exam. You bear the duty to explain to your fellow mates the topics that could most likely appear on the question paper. And they feel blessed if your predictions come true. Those who couldn't get your time amidst the high demand resort to study guides. These books look orders thinner than their prescribed counterparts (the textbooks), but have concise information that is just enough to score decent marks in the exams. The exam pattern gives a choice of questions to attempt, for e.g. five out of eight, to get full marks. You could easily skip a few difficult chapters off the syllabus without losing much score. Many questions in the exam require you to merely replicate topics from the textbooks, for e.g. describe something, derive an equation, solve a numerical example given in the book etc. So pulling an all-nighter is just sufficient to memorise the topics and to score a decent grade; you don't really need to spend months working on your understanding of the subject.

Things get tricky when you reach the final year. You bear the burden of doing a decent project for your degree, clear all your courses, prepare for campus placements and/or for higher studies. A few companies visit and recruit people on campus, but the placement percentages stay low. “Students lack skills” is their most common complaint. We assume there are too many applicants for few positions and so the competition is tough. Little do we realise that our groundwork wasn't right.

A lot of students buy their kit of final year project from one of the reputed vendors, intending to fallback on it in case of emergency. And many end up submitting the same without modifications. What would a project seek primarily out of you, if not to get you started with something new and hands-on? No matter how unintelligent you are or how simple your project is, if you did something on your own, it will count. Otherwise, why is your project so emphasised in your job interview? Because industry keeps changing its technology, courses you took in your curriculum will be obsolete in the next few years, that the skills you develop in your learning process solely matter to them. Your abilities to learn things on the go, your willingness take new challenges to improve yourself, your abilities to plan, code and execute projects on time, your personality and attitude make you invaluable. Recruiters try to judge these qualities of you from your project. You could always explain your attempting a simple project that you started with nothing but came up with the best you could, while working on your weaknesses. This - by all means - overweighs an excellent but copied project. Good recruiters can figure out your little secret of copying in no time. It tells them that you haven't utilised an exciting opportunity of building it yourself, that you were afraid to get hands-on, and that you might fail if you were hired.

So what stopped you from doing your project? Let's start with your simple homework assignments. A handful of students actually write them and everyone else tries to copy. They have a valid reason: they need to spend more time on other useless activities, for example writing laboratory records (copying loads of text, diagrams and tables) that involves zero thought process. Records give you nothing in the end, but the time spent on attempting homework adds value: that's when you read on your own and try figuring out things. You can be smart about completing boring activities as quick as possible. Colleges must realise this too, and improve other aspects as well. Exams need to reward novelty: for example students must get extra points for presenting their findings from (reliable) sources not prescribed. That's how students develop interest. Questions posed in the exams could be more novel: they could test practical applications of the topics, pose them in different perspectives, seek students' opinion, etc. instead of merely seeking to replicate topics from the book. They should penalise plagiarism in homework assignments.

There's more advice if you need. Stop worrying about you being not talented and try spending time on areas that interest you. Everyone has their areas of talent, it's just that you haven't discovered yours. Even if you feel you have none, you can always acquire skill through persistence, and your interest should drive that. Read more on the topics you like, from sources off the shelf and not merely for exams. Keep building your interests into passions. Of course, you need to maintain decent scores for your next career path; but five years down the line nobody cares if you stood third in the class or seventh. Start building little projects on your own, or write your tiny pieces of code and keep them improving. Have multiple hobbies, play well and get good exercise. We don't realise how hugely exercise impacts our concentration and health. Interact with people, develop a sense of humour and help them whenever you can. Don't let anyone's jealousy affect you: never mind if someone calls you a bookworm. Also, remind yourself that being jealous of someone gets you nowhere. In the end it is your skills that matter. There is no point trying to tease someone or to stop them from reading, getting good scores, or from being a lecturer's favourite. By discouraging them, you will still remain where you stand. Instead, take their inspiration, transform your negative feelings into improving yourself and, perhaps, make them your friends.

In the current situation where the job market has numerous vacancies, yet recruiters struggle to find the right candidates, I feel the above points improve placements as well as students' experiences in our engineering colleges, and contribute to the nation's employability and progress.