The Great Debate

First things first. I will confess that Post Graduate in IIT is like under-rated or say is not as pompous as Under Graduate. Well there are reasons for this and me and two of my friends went on a soul searching spree. We have this garden restaurant in campus where you can sit and enjoy and have tea, lush greenery, morning dew, dim light and a hot cup of tea. What else would you want? Our main topic was why in this whole world are PG’s not recognized in the same manner as UG’s. This issue was a pain in our heart since we entered because we were constantly reminded of this fact. Indeed this is really bad because you won’t expect this kind of difference among IITian’s. For outer world an IITian is an IITian but for us there are two parallel worlds that exist. In IIT itself you can see stark difference between a UG and and PG. One is handling the various activities which IIT’s are famous like the cultural festivals and technical festivals, while the onus of research lies upon the other community. This divide is increasing and is surely a thing which could be noticed once you are here for few months. Our issue was why PG students are not so participative in various activities of the institute and is only interested in being online whole day and making friends in cyberspace? Also when we have so many facilities provided by the institute why aren’t they utilized by them? We tried to reason this out and found various issues which are bogging them down. Although I am not trying to defend this community by giving any alibi it’s just that this problems exist and they need to be looked into before writing them off as someone who is not interested in the institute issues and activities. First thing which affects them most is the duration, the course duration is 2 years which are insufficient and if we are looking at effective time frame then think of this, first six months need to be removed as they are required for settling in the environment, in last six months the only thing which is on their mind is placement and once that is done the story ends. So only effective time they have is a year and in that too we have a break of 3 months so how in the whole world do we expect them to do everything else along with their studies and their projects. Although they should be able to do it cause “WORKLOAD” as they say in IIT is not that much but still the duration is so short that if you miss a chance then you have lost the chance to participate in anything. Second is that they are here for finding a socioeconomic security and to have this they need to study and get good placement. For this they need to concentrate on academics even in second semester. So this is one reason I find which leads to non participation of PG’s but still we decided to take upon us the work to infuse some energy into the PG community so that at least they can be represented well in the institute and they would also be looked upon as someone of importance and not as some third person.