A great college for your overall development

All NITs use the Jee Main rank to give admission, which is done via JOSAA. For getting into any B. Tech courses, you need Maths, Physics, and Chemistry as your subjects in Class 12th. The NITs have a reservation of 50% seats allocated to the home state students where the college is situated. For determining what a students home state is, it uses the state where you completed your 12th class. After a student appears for his Jee Main exam and gets a rank, he is eligible to apply for NITs. JOSAA starts its admission process where you have to make a list of preferences that include college and branch. For example - B. Tech in Chemical Engineering at NIT Rourkela is one such choice. Aspirants should be very careful at this step as I have seen a lot of students making mistakes and getting branches or colleges that they don't like. You can look up the previous year's trends to determine where and what branch you can realistically get.

The course curriculum has been updated with my batch. Though there is still room for improvement. Some of the older faculties still use traditional teaching methods like blackboard while some younger ones use ppt. It does not make a whole lot of difference other than the fact that you have to make notes for the former. There are some standard core subjects which are mandatory and then there are optional courses where you have to choose one from two choices. The choices were limited due to lower faculty numbers which I hope will improve. The faculty to student ratio is like 1:12. The main problem that I felt was a shorter time frame for teaching which lead to the omission of some chapters from certain subjects. The exams time is fixed. The difficulty depends on professors who are generally easy-going though there are exceptions.

There were not a lot of internship opportunities for our branch. Mostly it was offered for circuital branches. Some notable companies that offered stipends include Aditya Birla Group. Most of the students applied on their own for internships. Also at the time for an internship, the whole country was in lockdown and so core companies could employ us.

The campus placements start in the final year. There are both core and non-core jobs that will be offered. Each company is divided into 3 categories and one student can take one job in each category. Some of the notable core companies at our campus include Exxon Mobil, HUL, Eli Lily, PCBL, JSPL, JSW, Aarti Industries, Coromandel, etc. Around 98-99% of people get placed with 1 -2 students getting left behind. The highest package in our branch was around 15 LPA and average around 5.5 - 6 LPA.

The fees have been hiked considerably in the recent past along with the number of seats. My tuition fees per semester were 75000/- and overall my fees came around to 200000/-. However, this has been hiked and if I remember correctly is nearly another 50000 extra for the 2021 batch. There are no scholarships for general students. There are a few for SC and ST but as I am not a part of it, I am not aware of the details. Although, if your family's annual income is less than 500000/- then a portion of your tuition fees is reduced and if it is below 100000/- then it is entirely eliminated.

Campus life is the major draw. There are numerous clubs and societies on the campus. There are 2 major and 2-3 minor fests that are conducted in each academic year. The two major ones are Innovision which is the annual Techno-Management fest and NITRUtsav which is the annual cultural fest. There is a huge library inside the campus with modern amenities like WiFi, self-issue and return, etc. The classrooms are air-conditioned with projectors and speakers, Some rooms can accommodate around 40-50 students and some as high as 200. I was a part of a club called AIChE NIT Rourkela Student Chapter. It is a part of AIChE, which is the most respected chemical engineering organization in the world. We participated in a lot of regional and international conferences conducted by AIChE.

During the first year, students are kept in two exclusive hostels to protect them from ragging. There you get to share one room with another roommate. The room will have a pair of beds, tables, chairs, and one fan. You will also get an ethernet port to connect to the internet. After the first year, you have to shift to another hostel and it can be any of the other 5 boys' hostels. One of them has exclusively single rooms however their size is quite small. During my batch, we used to get single rooms after the completion of the second year. However, due to increased seats, now you will get a single room only after the third year. Some of the hostels have really nice and spacious rooms and some have dingy small rooms. The food is great with an avg of 6-7 non-veg dishes per week. This also changes from hostel to hostel as each hostel has its own mess. There is a student who is the mess in charge and he takes feedback and prepares a menu. The hostels are compulsory for everyone.