Experiencing Politics and downfall

This is about my college life. The 4 most (arguably) memorable years of a person’s life undergoing standard education in India. No doubt it was an experience. Probably a life changing one shaping me and my personality every day. But while all the study and fun were going on I experienced a lot of interesting things first hand - the politics of power in play, the misinformation and lack of accountability, and the after effects of the same. It’s probably to early for me to judge what might happen, and I do very much hope that my college progresses and shines; but the negative derivative does not point me there.

During these 4 years I ranked up my network and responsibilities. Starting from building fest websites, participating as well as leading tech of all major clubs, activities to managing all the College official web responsibilities as the Dean Academic Web Administrator. I was in touch with the professors in-charge as well as all staff and faculty of the college. This gave me a VIP ticket to all the internal ways and methods of a college. So went three years, listening to seniors ranting about how they had difficult it was to do something new in the college, get any kind of funding as well as the headache of getting permissions. In our final year we felt it, but even worse.

I would like to share you about the two worst decisions which our college took, without proper consideration resulting into detrimental impact on our culture.

Disclaimer: This is my perspective of the story, the facts, claims and quotes are true from my experience. There may be different reasons for the below mentioned acts outside of my knowledge.

Rescheduled technical festival

Our annual technical festival - Avishkar was always held in the odd semester, Oct-Nov organized by final years of all courses in the college. There are lots of opportunities to take part in and learn and have fun. After covid there was already a hit in the culture of college events. Our seniors still managed to organize an amazing fest and we were even more motivated to do the same this year. But when our semester started and the academic calendar was announced, Avishkar had been shifted to March in even semester along with Culrav, our cultural festival. This might not seem like a big issue, but let me highlight some concerns for you.

• Culrav, our cultural fest has dance, dramatics and other events that are managed by committees which practice for months before the event. Avishkar has events where students work on software development projects to participate in competitions
• Students will not be able to manage time simultaneously participating in these events
• The fests are organized by final years (majority of) which would be going for 6 month interns during their last even semester. Hence there will be almost no responsible student organizer present during the events. This was earlier not an issue as the 6 month internships were approved just a year ago for our college
• Avishkar is the only fest where students seriously build resume worthy projects and get to learn important necessary practical development skills required in industry

These concerns are high risk concerns for the culture of college. These directly impact the quality of talent present in college and will affect the placements, new registrations and overall culture of the college. After discussing with the entire CC team and realizing all these points, we made an application and raised our concerns to the faculty. The faculty agreed with out points and suggested us to add some solutions we would suggest against this decision. We planned on the rescheduling of Avishkar back to Nov as we still had enough time to organize and plan out the event.

The computer coding club (CC Club) is the major organizing contributor of the technical events of Avishkar

We took the approval of all branch HoDs as well as the Student Activity Center (SAC President) and took the application to the director. Our director, even without reading the application started questioning the issues in current schedule. We raised our concerns, which were rudely straight declined, unheard. Continuously being told that the top IIT’s (IIT Madras this, IIT Madras that…) also have their fests together and they are able to conduct. Unaware of even how the fest is held we were told that students academics were being badly affected by students not attending class due to Avishkar! Why would a student not attend an algorithms or OOP class when he literally has to use it for his/her project? Till date there was never a case of such class bunks due to avishkar, and we understood that he has never seen or even knows about the event. On raising the concern in difficulty for students to take part in both fests simultaneously we were told “a student will either dance or be serious and use a laptop”☠️. Considering that no faculty in senate were serious when such cost-cutting (more like cost-corrupting) decisions are being made, shows the abstraction of reality for the ones in power. Looking at other colleges, trying to copy decisions without even knowing about your own college is unhealthy. We were sent back with a rejected application.

Being responsible seniors we unofficially conducted the 5 most important events of Avishkar under a new event CodeSangam and successfully organized it at a larger scale allowing all 3 years of B.Tech. and MCA 1st years. We wanted to give back whatever our seniors gave us to juniors as long as we were there in college.

Dissolving the legacy of Dean Academic Web Team (D.A.W.T.)

From past 7 years our college students were actively involved in the digitalization of all the college processes. These processes include notice board, registration, fee payment, student dashboard, exam roll numbers, result entry, processing, announcement, transcripts, documents, hostel allotment, and any other web related process of college. And all these processing going on all over the year at different times for all courses (B.Tech., M.Tech., PhD, MCA, MSc, MBA, Part-time MCA/MBA) for all branches and years. This is clearly not an easy task and for most colleges, it is handled by teams of faculty, private organizations and private hires using proprietary software. But here, it was all built, managed and handled by a team of purely students hired in their third year and working till they are in college continuing the legacy. We consider this a privilege that students were given opportunity to handle such high responsibility tasks with freedom. The legacy of selecting the most talented responsible students for this team and the handling of situations in peak times was considered unbreakable. Sadly, we the batch of 2024 were the last members of the Dean Academic Web Team. The amount of work given to us was never rewarded with any benefits. Claiming stipends that even our super seniors never received. At least 4-5 query calls everyday (till date) regarding some data requirement, some correction, some update or some exceptional case handling. Sitting till late nights, working more than our academics just to make sure official processes go smoothly and issues are resolved on time. All these efforts were never rewarded, but we still happily worked because we knew that no one else ever could handle this otherwise.

We got news that decisions were being taken above to slowly shift to private hires and not depend on students for all the most essential college processes. It was still fine, as long as they know what and how to do it. Sadly, they did not.

Admissions were going on for the batch of 2027. We were provided with the necessary data from JoSAA 2 days before the registration process. Inserting the data into multiple cross dependent tables all with different columns and types, according to data provided was not the only difficult task we had to do. Ideally, websites like these should be ready at least a week before and thoroughly tested. And here we were starting the registrations just on time, unsure if even all workflow was successful or not. Still we managed to handle the minor issues and the process was smooth. We raised concern regarding the CSAB registration students and the data was yet unavailable. The data regarding them was received even later a day before their physical registration. All these delay in communication, data and lack of seriousness for official processes by faculty led to a very frictioned registration process, with us sitting on site whole day resolving issues for a long queue of students waiting for registration. Even after all these processes, it was found that there were exceptional cases of false registrations due to the data not being checked and validated before being provided to us. This lead to critical admission mistakes for students which are outright unacceptable. These issues were all resolved individually by the faculty after consideration.

When this matter was discussed with the director, the issue was blamed on the IT team👏. Director unaware of the fact that the college was running smoothly because of this IT team, instantly decided to dissolve the team and replace them with private hires. And thus came a tragic end to a beautiful culture of our college. As of Jan 2024, students have already started to notice the effects of this decision, with delays in results, registrations and any query resolution if in case they are able to resolve at all.

Consider this as a case study of some events in the timeline which result in the future aftereffects. With all this I would still hope that our college will grow and students be proud of studying at this established institute.