NIT Rourkela: Integrated M.Sc Chemistry review

The course is taken after completing the 12th or diploma. You need to take the JEE (Main) exam conducted by CBSE and get a score and percentile which will be higher than the required number of applicants and seats in the College to gain admission. The JEE (Main) application costs INR 1000 currently I believe. There is no separate form to be filled and just your application of interest will be taken after the score is released. During my time in 2015, I was a home domicile student also having OBC-NCL benefits. So I had a score of 92 which was sufficient to get admission. It may differ according to home state rules and reservation benefits. The admission process is pretty straight forward and I don't think there is any need for a major change.

I chose this course because I wanted to learn Chemistry and at the same time the fee of other Colleges was too high for me to afford with a good knowledge environment. I wanted a brand college because believe it or not, the higher expectations of the students and the work they do will eventually bring a lot of soft skills inside you that smaller colleges cannot provide. The student: faculty ratio was around 40:1 initially and as you become specialized it can even come to as low as 6:1. Happened to me. The professors are all Ph.D. and are highly qualified. They are all after all researchers. Most of them have 2-3 years of post-doc experience as well in many reputed foreign universities. The term exams were moderate to difficult. It is not that difficult to pass but to get good marks you need to study more. I guess that's the norm in every other college as well.

You are eligible for campus placements after the completion of your 8th semester (4 years). I don't have exact data for the number of companies visited and the number of offers made. But what I can say is that it is sufficient. Anyways many students are not interested in placements at all. From our batch of 21 students, I believe 12-13 got placed eventually and they were interested as well. Others didn't sit for the placements. And of the places, 75% or more didn't join the company and went for higher studies including me. So you can imagine how the recruiters will treat and offer the next batches. Average salaries data is not given by the institute so cannot say anything for certain. As an educated guess it would be around INR 4.5 LPA. I had planned to get a campus placement offer in a core company with at least INR 6 LPA or go for MBA. Sadly the previous didn't happen and I had to settle with the second.

The fee structure is reasonable with the exposure you will get. When I joined the college the per semester fee was around INR 20000 which by the time of my graduation in 2020 became INR 30000 roughly. Still, I would say the cost to study is reasonable with the facilities and environment you will get. Scholarships, financial assistance are only govt. sponsored and not institute sponsored. However, you can get loans from the campus SBI branch without collateral as well in some cases. Final placements you can get on campus but they are mostly relegated to teaching jobs at coaching institutes and if are even above average you can get a CTC of INR 6 LPA. If you are thinking of core sector or IT jobs, you will not even get chances in many of the companies. So forget about them. If you are joining this course be prepared to do a Ph.D. or some other job rather than a core sector job. I was placed in a core company but the pay was way too less and hence left for MBA. Hopefully, you get the drift.

There were 4 main college fests during our time that might have been reduced or scrapped due to COVID-19 as well as other administrative issues. NITRUSTAV was the cultural fest held in February and INNOVISION was the tech fest held in October. Apart from that other fests and sports meets would happen in November, January as well. The library is well maintained and contains lots of books and journals to cover you. Classrooms are adequate as well. They have all the necessary facilities. One problem that I faced was water was not available readily in the classroom areas (a nitpick of course :)). There are two main stadiums, DTS for athletics, football, and all other sports and STCS for cricket specifically. There were tennis courts, basketball courts, badminton courts, and a swimming arena as well. There are also lots of social clubs you can be part of within the campus. There is no dearth of them.