Shubham Sharma's Review On Punjab Engineering College University Of Technology - [PEC], Chandigarh

PEC is one of the finest colleges in Punjab and has a glorious past with highly celebrated alumni. I had to choose between PEC and NITs, specifically, NIT Jalandhar but due to some mistake in counseling form for NITs, I had no other option. So, the choice became pretty one sided and I chose PEC. Moreover, PEC is situated in Chandigarh which is a beautiful place to spend the best four years of your life!

The curriculum was at par with that of IITs but the ranking system was poor. I agree that you need to learn how things evolved so that you can appreciate the innovation behind invention or discovery. But, they generally cover a big part of our syllabus. Children used to get grades and marks just by sweet talks with professors or helping them with their chores.

We have our sixth semester as internship semester but I did not opt for one. I instead took up a research project with a PhD fellow at my college and one at IIT Ropar. But, companies visited my campus for internships and people got stipends ranging from 12000-100000 per month.

Companies keep visiting the campus throughout the year. As many as 150 companies visited the campus, I guess, when I was in my final year. Some of the names are Amazon, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Arcesium, DESHAW, OYO, JP Morgan, Airtel, Amadeus Labs, and the list goes on.The placement process is quite well managed and placement department does a very good role at it.

I had a very memorable campus life. The college has everything to offer. The academic and technical exposure is great. There are various events and workshops taking place almost all the times. Technical societies invite people from industry and academia throughout the year to share their experiences and guide the young and budding engineers. We have open house, industrial week, skill building workshops, technical workshops, and what not. I was a member of Dramatics Club at PEC and I have represented my college at various street play competitions and we have proudly won a lot of them.

I had a good JEE Mains rank and I belong to economically weaker section. So, I was awarded full tution fee waiver throughout my college life. There are many scholarship schemes for students, eg, the rank opener of every branch gets scholarship for the first year, SC students have 50% concession on annual tution fee, girls have scholarship schemes, students with excellent academic performance and those with excellent sports performance are awarded, etc.

The campus has a lavish green cover. There are three grounds in the campus and one small ground in each hostel. There is a good enough gymnasium hall and badminton court. The basketball court and cricket stadium have got floods and there are a couple of lawn tennis facilities. The equipments are, well, rusty, not technically, but to give you the gist. They have errors since they are old. In Electrical Engineering labs, most of the work was done on Matlab and simulations. So, there is a scope to improve. Library is quite spacious and there is wifi almost everywhere. The PEC market is like the heart of the campus.

There are 6 hostels in the campus, 2 girls hostels and 4 boys hostels. We have single occupancy rooms in the hostels and the rooms are satisfactory. We have wifi available in all the rooms and almost everyone gets a room. The rent is highly reasonable. It was around 54000 per year when I attended my college. The mess serves good food except for dinners (mostly). If you are not a resident of tri city, you will certainly get a hostel. The residents of tri city are considered for hostels on a first come first serve basis if there are empty seats after outsiders have been alloted seats.