Here’s an interesting question posted on an internet forum for best advice for an incoming student into IIT and an answer posted by Divye Kapoor an IIT alumnus .
Question: What is the best advice for an incoming CS student into IIT ?
Answer:
1) The world is bigger than your town/village/city.
There are going to be people from all walks of life, all social strata, divergent religious views and varied interests in your batch and you will be living together in the same hostel. You cannot escape them and they cannot escape you. Grow up and try to be nice to each other. You will learn more about parts of India in the hostel than you will in touring the country.
Side note for the “North Indians”: Everybody from south of the Vindhyas is not a Madrasi. You may want to read the quick and supremely illuminating primer here. [1] 2) You are no longer special or smart.
Every single person of your batch is going to be as smart as or smarter than you. Please, take a moment, read that last line and digest it – you are no longer going to be the topper in your class, you are liable to FAIL if you don’t study and you need to be able to accept that fact. Also, every single person around you has qualified the JEE. It holds no value now. The rank is just a number. It serves no purpose. Forget it. Put it on your resume sometime later in life, but nobody cares about it here beyond idle curiosity.
3) You are going to be homesick.
Most people face it: You’re going to hate the food, the living conditions, the people, the seniors, the pressure – whatever else. Get over it – and quickly. The long term effects of homesickness can be damaging. Yes – it’s not going to be as comfortable as home, so make yourself independent, self sufficient and capable of taking care of your own needs.
Typical time to get fully adjusted: 2 years.
Mean time to accept the new place: 2 to 6 months.
Some people never get fully adjusted to the food. Well, you live with it or find ways around it.
4) The IIT doesn’t owe you an education.
This is one of the hardest lessons to learn and I’ve seen people crib their whole 4 or 5 years on campus over this single fact. Take it to heart: This IIT or any other IIT for the matter doesn’t owe you anything in the name of education – not even a degree. The only thing that an IIT gives you is a rubber stamp on a certificate. It is your responsibility – I repeat – YOUR responsibility to teach yourself everything that you should know at the end of the 4 or 5 years of your course and make yourself worthy of being an IITian. Whether you learn it from books, from Youtube, from other people – it doesn’t matter. You make yourself worthy of being called an IITian, the IIT doesn’t make you worthy of being called one.
5) There are bad professors everywhere. Yes. Even at the IITs, Harvards and the MITs.
So you’ll come in with bright shiny eyes, looking for those amazing rockstar IIT professors to light up your eyes and shine the amazing complexities of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into your foggy brains without so much as twitching a finger. You’ll be looking for a world where everything is intuitive, everything just “makes sense” and nothing requires the rote learning of inorganic chemistry. Well, welcome to the real world: You will find profs that you will not like. You will find profs that you like as people but who are horrible as teachers. You will find professors that you are mortally terrified of but who know their subject inside out. You will also find, in certain cases, professors who don’t know anything. Some of your courses will have nothing to do with Computer Science and will involve a bunch of memorization of formulae with weird 5 digit constants. Be prepared to face these eventualities as and when they arise and then remember me when you’re going through them.
6) Politics.
Yes. It’s everywhere.
7) CGPA: The Cumulative Grade Point Average [2]
You will realize shortly into your first semester that there’s this brilliant thing called CGPA that allows IIT profs to grade a bunch of smart people against each other. The grading is relative and there will always be someone getting a 9 or a 10 and someone getting a 4 (Fail) or a 5 (barely pass). Your job, as a student is to navigate this minefield so that your CGPA stays over 7.000 (the standard “definition” of average) and preferably over 7.500 (the definition of “average” for CS people with respect to placements). As a CS student, this bar is usually tougher to achieve because you’ll be graded against the cream of your JEE batch. A general rule of thumb for CS students is: the CGPA with which you’ll graduate will be lower than the CGPA at the end of your first year (which has common subjects for all freshers).
Also, an interesting factoid:
Google had once set a CGPA bar of 9.000 (in 2007 I believe). They did not even look at resumes of students that had a lower CGPA. So yeah – if you’re in CS, CGPA matters.
There’s a piece of advice that I used to give to freshers when I used to meet them on campus while I was there as a “great grandfather”:
Last but not the least: Have fun.
This is going to be the last period in your life when you will have month long summer vacations. You should use this time wisely.
Best of luck. Do well. Congratulations of having achieved such a lot – there are lakhs of people out there who would give anything for the seat that you’ve just reserved. There’s a lot more yet to be achieved. Your journey has just begun. You can use these years to shape your life or squander it completely. The choice is completely up to you. This institute has helped people achieve the height of heights and it has also seen people fall into depths of despair. What you do with your life is a choice that you have to make on your own. Choose well and choose wisely. You will be defined by your decisions. Amen.
Question: What is the best advice for an incoming CS student into IIT ?
Answer:
1) The world is bigger than your town/village/city.
There are going to be people from all walks of life, all social strata, divergent religious views and varied interests in your batch and you will be living together in the same hostel. You cannot escape them and they cannot escape you. Grow up and try to be nice to each other. You will learn more about parts of India in the hostel than you will in touring the country.
Side note for the “North Indians”: Everybody from south of the Vindhyas is not a Madrasi. You may want to read the quick and supremely illuminating primer here. [1] 2) You are no longer special or smart.
Every single person of your batch is going to be as smart as or smarter than you. Please, take a moment, read that last line and digest it – you are no longer going to be the topper in your class, you are liable to FAIL if you don’t study and you need to be able to accept that fact. Also, every single person around you has qualified the JEE. It holds no value now. The rank is just a number. It serves no purpose. Forget it. Put it on your resume sometime later in life, but nobody cares about it here beyond idle curiosity.
3) You are going to be homesick.
Most people face it: You’re going to hate the food, the living conditions, the people, the seniors, the pressure – whatever else. Get over it – and quickly. The long term effects of homesickness can be damaging. Yes – it’s not going to be as comfortable as home, so make yourself independent, self sufficient and capable of taking care of your own needs.
Typical time to get fully adjusted: 2 years.
Mean time to accept the new place: 2 to 6 months.
Some people never get fully adjusted to the food. Well, you live with it or find ways around it.
4) The IIT doesn’t owe you an education.
This is one of the hardest lessons to learn and I’ve seen people crib their whole 4 or 5 years on campus over this single fact. Take it to heart: This IIT or any other IIT for the matter doesn’t owe you anything in the name of education – not even a degree. The only thing that an IIT gives you is a rubber stamp on a certificate. It is your responsibility – I repeat – YOUR responsibility to teach yourself everything that you should know at the end of the 4 or 5 years of your course and make yourself worthy of being an IITian. Whether you learn it from books, from Youtube, from other people – it doesn’t matter. You make yourself worthy of being called an IITian, the IIT doesn’t make you worthy of being called one.
5) There are bad professors everywhere. Yes. Even at the IITs, Harvards and the MITs.
So you’ll come in with bright shiny eyes, looking for those amazing rockstar IIT professors to light up your eyes and shine the amazing complexities of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into your foggy brains without so much as twitching a finger. You’ll be looking for a world where everything is intuitive, everything just “makes sense” and nothing requires the rote learning of inorganic chemistry. Well, welcome to the real world: You will find profs that you will not like. You will find profs that you like as people but who are horrible as teachers. You will find professors that you are mortally terrified of but who know their subject inside out. You will also find, in certain cases, professors who don’t know anything. Some of your courses will have nothing to do with Computer Science and will involve a bunch of memorization of formulae with weird 5 digit constants. Be prepared to face these eventualities as and when they arise and then remember me when you’re going through them.
6) Politics.
Yes. It’s everywhere.
7) CGPA: The Cumulative Grade Point Average [2]
You will realize shortly into your first semester that there’s this brilliant thing called CGPA that allows IIT profs to grade a bunch of smart people against each other. The grading is relative and there will always be someone getting a 9 or a 10 and someone getting a 4 (Fail) or a 5 (barely pass). Your job, as a student is to navigate this minefield so that your CGPA stays over 7.000 (the standard “definition” of average) and preferably over 7.500 (the definition of “average” for CS people with respect to placements). As a CS student, this bar is usually tougher to achieve because you’ll be graded against the cream of your JEE batch. A general rule of thumb for CS students is: the CGPA with which you’ll graduate will be lower than the CGPA at the end of your first year (which has common subjects for all freshers).
Also, an interesting factoid:
Google had once set a CGPA bar of 9.000 (in 2007 I believe). They did not even look at resumes of students that had a lower CGPA. So yeah – if you’re in CS, CGPA matters.
There’s a piece of advice that I used to give to freshers when I used to meet them on campus while I was there as a “great grandfather”:
- Your seniors in 2nd or 3rd year will tell you that CGPA doesn’t matter. Do not listen to them. Time after time, year after year, batch after batch has proven that when placements happen, the guy with the 9.000 CGPA always gets shortlisted for the best jobs and the one with the 6.5 CGPA never does, even if he’s a rockstar.
- Don’t necessarily concentrate on your CGPA alone. A perfect 10 will not help you with anything if you’re bad at everything else. This is the best time and place for you to learn about people. Go try your hand at extracurricular activities and to do things that you will never have the opportunity to do again. Roorkee has a bunch of such opportunities – Cognizance [3], NSS [4], NSO, NCC, Lit, Debating, Boating, Entrepreneurship Club, Watch Out, Kshitij, Electronics Club, Photography, IEEE etc. Pick some and join them. They’re going to help you meet likeminded people who will turn out to be some of your best buddies in college and beyond.
Last but not the least: Have fun.This is going to be the last period in your life when you will have month long summer vacations. You should use this time wisely.
Best of luck. Do well. Congratulations of having achieved such a lot – there are lakhs of people out there who would give anything for the seat that you’ve just reserved. There’s a lot more yet to be achieved. Your journey has just begun. You can use these years to shape your life or squander it completely. The choice is completely up to you. This institute has helped people achieve the height of heights and it has also seen people fall into depths of despair. What you do with your life is a choice that you have to make on your own. Choose well and choose wisely. You will be defined by your decisions. Amen.
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