Engineering is amongst the few professions where creativity and ingenuity knows no bounds. Considering that technology is the religion of modern times, becoming an engineer is a dream of most students. The first step towards this goal is selecting the best engineering college. Even if the options depend on the performance of the student in the academic and competitive exams, the number of options available is so large that it becomes a big task to set the right order of priority. Lack of information can cause a student with good rank to land in a college of lower priority. The only way to prevent it is focusing on the key elements and gathering information about those elements.
Decisive factors
There are a lot of factors which need to be considered before selecting the college. For example a college which has good infrastructure may not have experienced faculty or a college with faculty full of expertise may not have the necessary infrastructure. So, every aspirant should consider all the aspects before making his/her mind. There are a lot of aspects in which a college needs to be good to appear on the wish list of the students. A few of them are campus life, infrastructure, faculty, interface with industry, internships, and placement assistance.
• well equipped campus: the college must have a campus life which is complete in every respect. The students should get opportunities to meet and socialize with new people. They should learn the skills of team building. There should be enough exposure to the industry and its processes. A good infrastructure is required for the students to be tech-savvy and also to perform the experiments and nurture their thought process. No one can deny this fact that practical knowledge is as important as the theoretical knowledge.
• a knowledgeable faculty: the faculty of the college should consist of people who, in addition to having a deep knowledge of the subject, also have a firm grasp over the technological trends. The teaching process should include unconventional methods to provide the students with a closer view of the elements of engineering. Review the number of faculty members with a PhD degree. While some of the faculty members without a PhD may be very good teachers (and some even researchers), they are fewer in number. You need to collect as much information as you can from different sources. So, a lot of research work is required before you take your pick.
• industry related exposure: the gap between academia and industry should be bridged by the college by inviting industry veterans to the campus and allowing the students to interact with them. The students need to know about the skills which are required for getting a job and they should opt for those colleges which are helping the students acquire those skills. So, the college which provides the right combination of technical skills and soft skills are the best options.
Although choosing a college depends on the options you have on the basis of your performance in entrance examinations, there is no reason for losing hope if you could not make it to the top institution. Going for the college which emphasizes on building industry specific skills is the right way of choosing. The college of your choice should be regular on providing internships and placement assistance. Such colleges have a good reputation in the corporate world and the top companies visit such colleges in the placement season. While some colleges (such as the IITs) have a high brand recall because of their quality of education as is reflected by the achievements of their alumni and the research output of faculty and graduate students, other colleges have high brand recall due to advertising on a large scale. Smaller colleges cannot afford the same advertisement budgets and hence lose out on branding even if they provide good quality education.
In today's society, almost all students and parents take the value of the first paycheck as the only measure of success. Even if money is important to you, the career earnings should be more important that the first paycheck. Approved faculty should be a priority while choosing a college, followed by infrastructure and placements. It is not too difficult to collect all this information if you focus on just the colleges you are serious about.
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