Disclaimer: All the information contained herein is recent as of 2022. Leaving the accuracy of specific data aside, focus on the overall structure and message.

Congratulations on your admission to Manipal Institute of Technology! You’ve braved the hellscape of college admissions and finally committed to a college that you’re sure will provide you the best there is―or at least, the best you can get. I’m sure you must be eager to come to campus and experience the college life; you’ve reached campus, slept through the orientation, moved into your dorm room, and waved your parents a tearful goodbye.

Now what?

At this point, most students blank out. Some mutter something about student projects and technical clubs, even as the party animals are already rearing to go to one of the many nightclubs dotting the periphery of campus. What’s an ‘average mummy-papa ka baccha’ supposed to do?

If you’re looking for a way to maximise the 4 years you’ll be spending in college, especially on the academic and life side (because I’m pretty sure you don’t need a guide to party hard), this handy guide should give you a pretty good idea of what to do!

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First Year Shenanigans

For most first-years, this is their first time away from home as a free, autonomous individual, and that coupled with the general public perception of the place means that you’ll find a ton of typical extroverts hanging about and socializing with each other. As an introvert myself, I understand the peer pressure felt by most average kids to be ‘part of the gang’.

You don’t have to do any of these social things necessarily though.

Don’t worry about the FOMO; like all things, no one is going to care if you don’t attend the ‘freshers party’ or join the dance floor in FC-1 in the next couple of months. If people give you shit for it, maybe they aren’t meant to be your friend? -_-

Take your time to settle in, walk around the campus a bit, and if you feel like it, talk to the person you sit beside in the food court. Things can and will happen in their own time without your trying to force it. That being said, without a doubt, as a new entrant to campus, here are the things you should definitely do:

1. Say Hi to your neighbours!

This might just be the most difficult task in this entire list, simply by virtue of being the first time any normal introvert might have had to talk to someone they weren’t forced to interact with. If you have a roommate, then this task does get easier; if you can make good with someone you’re going to spend the rest of the year with, then your neighbours would not be as hard. Some of the more extroverted ones might also take the initiative to bring you along to some social event or do what we used to call ‘late-night meetups’ where most people on a floor would congregate and talk about random stuff. From my personal awareness of interpersonal dynamics, the guys tended to be more open to random group meetups like this, but this isn’t preventing gals from doing the same!

As always, you don’t have to force yourself to go to these things if you don’t want to. I myself attended one of these things a couple times before I stopped going. There are plenty of other ways to socialize in and around campus!

2. Go to the Student Plaza! Just look around, though.

The student plaza is undoubtedly the centre of the student life on campus. However, for the most part, apart from the start of every semester and every weekend, the place is practically deserted, even more so when exam season (which spans the most of the semester) kicks in. This is also where most people tend to socialize with random people, get annoyed by people with posters, look at the fountains, or have some couple’s time. As a professional asocial, I would go to the student plaza and watch people go about their business, and more often than not I’d find someone striking up a conversation with me―a classmate, a colleague, sometimes even a gutsy first year.

In this age of texting and the internet where we’re more connected to people on Instagram than we are in real life, as someone that spent half their life without the internet or social media (even as a 2000-born kid) it’s sad to see the effect it has on kids nowadays.

3. Chalk out a Roadmap.

Aside from the department orientation where you’ll be shown the labs and have the opportunity to interact with the faculty, take the time out to learn more about the labs if you can, and more importantly, if you’re interested in research, try contacting any of the faculty or senior tour guides to learn more about how the department operates and how you can get involved. The first thing you should definitely do is create a roadmap of sorts w.r.t the topics that are taught in the department curriculum (for which you will have to go through the curriculum PDF). Assuming you haven’t gone through this before prior to choosing your branch, this will help you understand what subjects to prioritize in your first year.

Fun and games aside, people forget to realize that for all the events and social things that the college organizes, it is a college after all. And with being in a college, comes writing exams — a fact that most people tend to forget right up to the first major exam of their college life:

The Midsem Canon Event ^TM

This and the first end-semester exam have vanquished many a naive child, cementing their place as the first great filter that separates the wheat from the chaff. Don’t forget it.

4. Try Out for a Student Project (and Don’t Chicken Out)!

The hype behind Student Projects is quite funny, actually. Most people like to fight over student projects the same way they fought over colleges: comparing sponsors, looking where SP alum have ended up, and of course the quintessential ‘which is the best / biggest student project to join?’ question people spam in every fresher group.

I am honestly sick of this question, to be honest. There’s no ‘best student project for AI’ or ‘best student project for ECE’. Everything depends on what product you work on. Of course, there’s going to be projects that may feature a higher reliance on some aspects than others, but that shouldn’t deter you from joining the project you really want.

Please don’t window-shop this. You’ll regret it.

Each student project works on a different ‘product’ towards some national and international competition. For Manas, it’s IGVC; for Formula Manipal, it’s Formula Student; for Mars Rover Manipal, it’s the University Rover Challenge; the list goes on. Their taskphases — apprenticeship-type training/probationary periods for potential new members — can be quite gruelling, and most people may not be able to handle the pressure. It’s completely okay if you feel you’re not cut out for a certain student project or even student projects in general; you can always try out for a technical club instead. However, do try out if you can just so you can tell yourself ‘I tried at least’ — who knows, maybe you’ll make the cut!

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Second Year Awakenings

The third semester is the second great filter separating those that relied on their 12th boards proficiency to coast through the first year; it is very common for most people to suffer a reduction in GPA in the third semester simply due to the nature of the subjects being totally alien to anything learnt before. For a lot of other students, this is also the time after they’ve explored all they could in the first year and are settling down to focus on their interests. That being said, there’s still a ton of uncertainty in what they want to do in the future.

Pay attention this year; it can set you up for success in later years if you focus enough.

Depending on what your intended goals are — working in the industry or pursuing higher education — your choice of electives, the courses you wish to focus on in the curriculum, the projects you devote time to in your free time, etc. all can help contribute to your profile, especially if you wish to start applying for technical internships from this summer onwards. First off though:

1. Get More Involved with your Department!

As second year students, an orientation session will be held at the beginning of the academic year. Each faculty covers the various subjects they teach, along with an introductory lecture that provides an overview of what will be covered. Similar to the department tour given to first year students, they also talk about the various labs the department has, have a couple senior students part of student projects or research introduce their work, and possibly also have some alumni (I spoke this year!) providing their own insight. Use this opportunity to network with faculty, especially if you’re interested in certain fields and want to get a head start.

I cannot overstate enough how important networking is, especially in the early stages. Relationships take time to build, and the better your professional relationship the better, especially when you run through rough patches in your academics and need assistance w.r.t figuring out technical hiccups during courses.

2. Choose Your Specialization(s)… If you can.

Look at the curriculum offered by your department. Towards the end, you’ll find a bunch of subjects offered under the ‘minor specialization’ buckets. These tend to have a very high (almost one-one sometimes!) correlation to skills required in the industry targeted by said minor. Definitely look at those and use that as a guide to figure out things you want to focus on. Try to read up on topics covered in the curriculum, relevant content creators on YouTube and social media. Aside from this, there’s also I generally prefer the following breakup:

1. Technical Specialization: The one thing relevant to your field that you wish to specialize in. For me at the time, being a Mechatronics student, it was Robotics and Automation.
2. Non-Technical Specialization: One skill tangentially relevant to your field where you can leverage technical expertise, but it doesn’t intrude into it. Most management-related skills tend to fall here, but even coding counts. For me, it was Systems Engineering.
3. Life Skill: One skill that can make money to get by. Usually, blue-collar skills, menial tasks and other minor stuff comes here. For me, it was Education/Teaching.

Veritasium, Mark Rober, Lesics etc. are some great creators in the engineering and STEM space, among a ton of other channels focussing on embedded systems, software engineering, etc.

3. Join a Student Engineering Chapter if you haven’t yet!

By this point, I’m sure you may be aware of the difference between a student project like Formula Manipal and a club like ASME, but just so we’re on the same page: A student project is a dedicated team of students working on a single project with the aim to compete at a competition. A student club is a focus group centred around a common topic, but not necessarily composing a singular team.

Join student projects to grind technical skills and compete seriously. Join student clubs to network and work on personal projects together.

It’s definitely helpful to join a bunch of engineering societies associated with your discipline: IEEE, ASME, IEI, ISA, etc. Find the local chapter associated with your preferred society and join them — if they don’t exist, make one! These give you the necessary connections to the industry (if you play your cards well) that can help you advance in your career.

As someone that founded a couple clubs myself, most clubs tend to be quite dead especially after the original founding team and their successors graduate, only waking up a couple times a year to do a workshop or two before disappearing back into the abyss. This is why even though there’s so many clubs at Manipal only a few are very well known in the culture. This is why I espouse student projects for technical skill building because of the directed nature of their work.

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Third Year Grindset

By this time, most of the things I’ve talked about should get you pretty set up for the other two years. By this time, most options tend to get whittled down to only a few, so unless you’ve already set yourself to do something, you won’t have much to choose from, especially since the 4th year is approaching, and fast.

If you’re waking up now, this is the time to lock in.

You can still make a comeback if you’ve been cooked these past two years, but keep it mind that it will be very hard academically (and almost impossible if you have an abysmally low GPA like 7 and below or something). I won’t make any guarantees, if you haven’t been having a good time till now, start the damage control before it’s too late.

Replan your Roadmap.

Now that you’ve take a bunch of courses, participated in some extracurriculars, and (hopefully) gotten an internship (or at least applied for some), its time to revisit that roadmap you planned way back in the first year and tweak it to fit current sensibilities and information. This is especially helpful if your plans have changed! Prioritize further plans after graduation: if you know you want to go into the industry, which companies / roles / sectors do you want to break into? If it’s higher education, do you want to go for an MS/MEng/PhD or anything else? Which university do you wish to apply to? Prioritize things like this.

There’s not much else to do in this and the upcoming year, especially if you’ve done well the first couple years. Enjoy life while you can — you’ll reminisce about these times later.

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Fourth Year — Do or Die Time.

This is it, y’all, the end of the road! By this point, you are either absolutely set or absolutely cooked. There isn’t much else I can do to help y’all here. If you have a bunch of skills, great! Use those skills to apply to companies and universities! If you don’t, I honestly don’t know what to tell you.

If you seriously spent 4 entire years not having at least one-two core competencies or something then that’s a helluva skill issue bruh. I genuinely cannot fathom someone being in this state, but my gut tells me I’ll be proven wrong. Ah well. My condolences.

1. Sit for Placements only if you Actually are.

We’ve had a bunch of people every year apply for placement opportunities, get job offers and simply drop them because they intended to apply for higher education instead (or, god forbid, get bragging points). This leaves a bad impression on companies that come to Manipal, and we’ve had some instances in the past where they straight up didn’t come the next year because of it. As someone that’s sat on the other side of the recruiting table before, companies invest time and resources every time they conduct any campus recruitment process, since representatives have to be sent over on company time. When a candidate refuses an offered position, that’s time, resources, and people lost, since we can’t get the people we refused back easily.

2. Try to do a Final Project instead of going through Practice School.

In the 8th semester, students have the option to either do a project under faculty supervision on campus, or intern in a company off campus on a project (called practice school). This is a bit of a personal opinion, but from second-hand experience hearing from friends that went through the practice school process, it’s more difficult to present a project through that method, especially if the work you do is covered under an NDA like most companies do for their projects. This leads to people two-timing the thing, by working in a company and then additionally doing a project under a faculty. Save the hassle if you can.

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Congrats on reading to the end! Have a cookie! 🍪

I haven’t gone into the nitty-gritty of each of the tips I’ve given to give you some room to roam, but feel free to interpret this as strictly or leniently as you wish! No matter what you do, just make sure you don’t regret it. Now go forth and suceed!