A visit to VIT
In a older post I had said that VIT's position in India Today's ranking was undeserved. Well yesterday I had the chance to go to VIT. My cousin sister had counselling in VIT and my Mama had asked me to come along. What I saw at VIT is divided into 3 parts. The good, the bad and the ugly.

The good
1. The buildings at VIT look absolutely gorgeous from the outside. The library in particular was really well done. I wish we had a library like that (I'm talking just about the building here) in IIIT.
2. A building called the technology tower was also very impressive with it's hanging gardens theme.
3. Canteen Rocks!
4. Sports facilities were pretty good. A tad over-indulgent to be honest.
5. Nice lawns. the walkways have small shades built all over them to escape from the sun which I hear is pretty strong usually.

The Bad
1. During the counselling they totally mis-represented the placements. When I asked for an average for the CS department the answer was it's somewhere between 3 and 5 lpa. When I asked for a number, I was, after a lot of persuasion, given a number of 3.3 Lpa by somebody in the PAT dept.
2. I wanted to go and check out the the CS department. I was stopped by one of the many rude security guards present in the campus. When I insisted he took me to some faculty member who was apparently a prof. He asked me stuff like "why do you want to see the dept.?", "What is the point in speaking to he faculty?" etc... I then walked into the office of the Public relations officer who, scared of me creating a scene told the guard to take me to the CS department. Why would you stop people from checking out departments?
3. There are apparently 500 students in a single batch of computer science. I enquired about this branch coz this is the one my cousin is joining. 500 people! Source P.R.Officer


The ugly

1.In the batch of 500 students 266 seats were offered through counselling and the rest i.e.234 were offered under the management quota. This is shocking. So much so that I confirmed this thrice. Once with the PRO, once with the admissions office and once more with some CS faculty!! Apparently the numbers for ECE and some extent EEE are also rather identical!! For those people who had commented on my blog about VIT offering only 10% seats through donations....People go check you figures. These are shocking proportions to take through management quotas!!
2. After I manged to get into the CS dept. I spoke to some faculty members. I cannot express in words how poor they were. VIT has about 180 faculty members in the CS dept. Of these 3~4 have PhD's the rest of the people have a B.tech/MCA background. I spoke to about 15 faculty members and hardly anyone was capable of carrying out a conversation on any academic lines. I was left speechless at how unbelievable bad there are. I have absolutely no idea of how these people are going to educate students in the art of CS! Here is a part of a conversation I had with 3 faculty members. All 3 were senior lecturers. I will not use names :P

f1: What are doing(as in where are u studying?)
me: sir I'm at IIIT-h. I'm a dual degree student. I'm doing my ms/r part right now.
f1: what is ms/r
me: This means you will get your MS for research work and not coursework. You will have to produce some research work that will form your thesis and after that you need to defend it.(some more explanation about msbr followed)
f2: So you don't do any courses in your final year?
me: yeah pretty much. The focus is on research.
f2: Tch Tch what kind of a PG course is this? You should look at the M.tech course at VIT. We teach our students advanced concepts like software engg and java programming!
f3: so You need to just present a few papers and you get your MS?
me:(utterly shaken state) Yes thats it ...just a few papers(sigh!)

some time later we came to the topic of placements.

f2: we had very good placements this year. M$ , google and yahoo came here.
me: How many people did google hire?
f2: Google didn't hire anybody.
f3: actually google's selection process was wrong. They allowed only computer science people to sit for their written tests and in that written test they asked things that were out of syllabus.
At this point I started to giggle!
f3: Why man ...what is so funny?
me: Nothing sir...I was just thinking how silly these IT companies can be! Asking things out of syllabus is really atrocious :D

There is a lotta more masala where this came from but I shall not write it in respect of those Studying at VIT (which includes my cousin :P)

But on a more serious note what I saw at VIT was the unholy nexus of money and education in it's full fury. While I'm not against institutes charging very high fees, I'm against institutes selling them. Also I have now developed great respect for those who study at VIT and manage to do well with their careers. It's a credit to them to be able to emerge from this mess and do well. I hope my cousin can do the same.

And for India today and all those who campaigned for VIT on one of my previous posts. It is very irresponsible of you to attempt to position VIT as a top class institute ahead of NIT-T,NIT-w and IIIT-h. For those who study there and know the place I'm even more shocked that they would consider lobbying for VIT. With the faculty you have and the method of admissions....all your infrastructure counts for absolutely nothing. I never ever imagined that the faculty would be so so atrociously bad. Good luck to whoever studies there.

PS: This post contains only my opinions and shouldn't be your guide to choosing/rejecting VIT. Go there and check out the place to form a educated opinion. 

Rank 1776


Allotted Mtech at IIITH


 

n guiza.....dude he's no fluke....he's d highest scorer in la liga..dis year....27 goals r a fluke....hahahhahaha... 

dude c'mon.....
every1 knows xavi hernandez is 1 of the best playmakers in d world ...him along wid iniesta....r the backbone of d spanish armada...... 

Xavi is preferred over cesc coz Xavi and Iniesta are Barca teammates..they have better co-ordination having played together so much...also,fabregas is a bit low on intl level experience....