POOJA T S's Review On College Of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram

The best college in Kerala, be it academically, be it infrastructure wise or be it the culture.

I took Kerala Engineering Entrance Examination and secured a rank of 1700 in the state level. I opted for College of Engineering Trivandrum CET because it is considered to be the best and number one among all the engineering colleges of Kerala State which has completed it 75 years of excellence.

Course curriculum was diverse and exciting. For all the fresher first yea-rites, irrespective of their department , we all had to study 13 compulsory subject which includes engineering subjects like civil, electrical, mechanical,electronics, graphics, mechanics so on an so forth. From sophomore on wards the subjects become more stream oriented and specific. There used to be some compulsory civil subjects but then we had couple of electives also that we could choose according to our aptitude towards allied branches of civil. It includes geotechnical, traffic engineering, computer languages, enviroment, structures etc.

Companies were enthusiastic to come to our college and recruit summer interns. This internship recruitment was not a practice in core subjects but for Computer science and electronics there used to be. Firms like ISRO, Amazon, Oracle used to take their interns and pay them well. Now coming to my area of Civil, I did around three internships all without stipend. One in a construction firm based in Ernakulam, another in COSTFORD and the last in IIT Madras. These all were purely study based internships and thus couldn't expect any stipends.

Multinationl firms and Indian Maharatna companies were so enthusiastic about coming and recruiting students from CET. We had a super enthusiastic placement committee as well, who helped the companies to reach our college for placements talks. They were keen to help the junior students in getting trained for placement exams, group discussions and interview. The committee made sure that every student bagged a job, so students who got placed once with a big package deal was not allowed to sit for other company's placement. The companies where divided into two category. 1. Dream companies, which were established in a national or international level, offering a whooping annual package of 8lpa to 12lpa 2. IT companies, which is famous for its contribution in Indias IT sector. Firms like ISRO, Amazon, MuSigma, Microsoft, HP, IOCl comes under dream category and IT companies are Cognizent, IBM, TCS, Infosys, Mindtree, Capgemini etc. 92% of the students were placed in Civil dept in the year 2012.

There used to be numerous intra and inter college technical and cultural festival where participants from different college used to come. All department used to have its own technical fests. Intracollege technical fests used to be on robotics, construction Technics, mechanical etc. Every departments used to have its own cultural nights like civilnight, mechnite, electrical night etc. Colleges biggest cultural festivals were Sargam and Dhwani. Sargam was only for CET students and Dhwani usis an inter college festival. Dhwani was the biggest of all and national and international celebrities used to come and perform.

I studied with an AICTE scholarship of 4000 rupee per year. There are banks in the premises of college, so availing loan is not a problem. Financially weak students were given special fee waver according to their financial band. And as I said so many other central and state sector scholarships are available which will be given based on your academics records and religious stature, for example central sector scholarship for minorities.

CET got a very beautiful campus with separate men's and ladies hostel. It got its own Akeshya lawn called the "Lovers Forest". An am-phi theatre, a main canteen, civil canteen, sports complex, cricket ground etc etc are some for the campus amenities. I used to dance for almost all cultural programs. There were gym and badminton court inside the sports complex. People used to play table tennis as well. CET have several students organisation like CETAA, ISTE, IEEE, Environmental Club, NSS etc etc.Since I was in civil engineering I have no clue about Robotics. But I have heard alot about the college Robotics CLub as well. Our college had our own college union which conducted its annual elections. College had its own diversity regarding sex, caste and creed. In civil we had a 1:1 proportion of sex. We had people from almost all religion. Even our college had reserved seats for students from North East.

Hostel Facilities were really good. There are two different rooms 2 sharing and four sharing. Mess food is also good which serves both veg and non veg. Average rental used to be very minimal around 200-300 rupees per month and the mess fee used to be in and around 1500.

We have a well connected huge network of Alumini. We used to have Alumini meets in different parts of the world. And the placements in college are always supported and backed up by the Alumini group.

There used to be university semester exams which happened once in 6 months, during every semesters. Apart from that internal marks were calculated based on the performance in series examination, which used to be conducted twice a semester and the attendance percentage. There used to be at least one lab subject in every semester and one project for the final semester. But days were chilled out and not hectic.

The notification for the entrance examination got released in the month of January. I gave the examination in the month of March and the results were out by August. The qualified candidates were called for giving their preference of subject and college though single window online system. According to the merit students were given seats for their eligible college and degree subject. Fee remittance and rest of the admission procedures were done in person at their respective allotted college.

The faculty of CET is just the mirror image of the thousands of talented intelligent students who managed to get a seat in the college. Most of the faculties are alumni of the college who did their post graduation and research from prestigious other Indian institutes like NITs IITs IISc and even abroad. Faculties are passionate at their work and even got deep knowledge in subjects and some are even with industrial consultancy experience.