IIT ISM

The college culture is excellent, but the academics, infrastructure and placements are the areas where college administration needs to work on, especially with global recession, we have the challenge and opportunity to stand out from the rest out there.

We have 18 faculties at my college, and as name suggests, we excel in earth sciences. But in recent years we are developing our curriculum so all the departments are at same level. The courses are research driven though some of them haven't been updated in many years causing students to lack a competitive advantage with recent technologies. Also courses need to incline more at industrial orientated learning rather than just theoretical knowledge.

With global economic recession and COVID-19 pandemic, the placement have drastically dropped, very few companies are conducting any serious hiring process and those who do are from IT and analytics sector. Core sector companies are the least and they don't offer much pay either. Career Development Center lacks workforce and a marketing department. College's remote location doesn't help either. In 2017-18 we saw 94% placements, but they have dropped to 50% ever since, and that too due to IT and analytics sector. If we look for core placements we are at around 20% hardly. The internships offered in IT sector are again good and well paid, but with core sector there are almost no internships this year with around 9 students from the batch of 120 managed to get on campus internships in core sector. Institute is focused on making students expert in institutes curriculum, however due to faults in curriculum itself, the companies aren't interested in our college students as they were once. New rank based grading systems resulting in much lower grades doesn't help with off campus placements either.

Being an IIT we have technical festival. Concetto is our annual techno management fest conducted in September, it's mostly a collection of technical competitions organised by various departments, some talks, exhibitions and conferences. Due to remote locality, our reach isn't much we have around 90 percent of participants from local colleges of neighbouring states. With improved budget we are hoping to make this fest even bigger in coming years. Srijan is the cultural festival of IIT ISM Dhanbad, it's one of the biggest cultural festival of east India and we have all sorts of cultural activities including concerts and star nights there.

In an IIT, the fees you have to pay depends on your income. The annual tution fees is 2 lacks rupees with additional 50K charges for hostel and mess. If you have annual family income below 8 lacks you're offered fee waiver with 66% concession in tution fees, so it's affordable for the college of this magnitude. Also we have Means cum Merit Scholarship for further decrease in tution fees, this one too based on family income and merit of the respective student. If you don't fall into this category, the fee structure is pretty expensive, and merited or not you've to pay complete fees. However there are no additional charges other than this and we have a full transparancy in our fees structure.

I don't have any scholarships or education loan. But fee waiver requires annual family income below 8LPA to waive off 66% tution fees. There are other alumni scholarships too. SC/ ST students aren't required to pay any tution fees. And there's means cum Merit Scholarship you can avail from the government of India.

With strong alumni base and established culture, the student life here is pretty good. With experience, we know which things work and which don't so that helps a lot. We have a strong legacy of cultural and sports clubs covering several areas and improving college culture through it. It strongly increases the overall growth of a student rather than just studies. Name a thing students have fun with, parties, sports, cultural societies, we have all of them. We hace a poor gender ratio though, with surprisingly low number of females qualifying for our college, we are working to improve that. Being a national level institute we are blessed with students from diverse backgrounds, and it's fun celebrating every culture out there.

IIT ISM Dhanbad is in-situ kind, we have reasonably big residential campus and thus all the requirements of a student are fullfied within the campus itself, the college is independent of outside city in terms of housing, every person working for college and every student had quarter and hostel respectively. It isn't allowed for non local students to live outside campus, it isn't convenient either given the ban on motor vehicles in campus for personal use. So naturally every student lives in the college hostel, with 8000 students, we have many hostels here where each student shares a room with one other student. Hostels are divided branch wise and batch wise, so you live with your friends generally. Rents are quite reasonable. We have to pay around 15000 rs as hostel rent annually. Mess facilities are provided within hostel itself, but have seperate charges. Hostels are highly maintained and living standards are quite good.

It given the fact that our college was established back in 1926 we have a strong alumni foundation and a good senior junior culture. Wherever you stumble across any of college alumni, you'll get any sort of help. Such caring seniors and alumni make our college so special.

We have to clear Joint Entrance Exam Advanced first, them on the basis of all india merit list and our filled preferences we get our match of college. The counselling is coordinated by Joint Seat Allocation Authority. So first we clear exams, then competitive matching process and then verification and physical admission to the college.

All lecturers of my department are highly qualified and all have doctorates in their respective field. We have 36 professors in my department. Average age might range around 45. However thing that doesn't work here is the diversity of their work fields. Thermo and energy, Manufacturing and fluid dominate the department. Thus some important subjects like Design, Computational analysis, Biomechanics, feel left behind, and especially when we have so much opportunities in these areas now. All are experts with their field, are good teachers and have industrial experience but since mechanical is such a vast field, lack of diversity bothers me.