IIT – Page 5 – Pertinent Observations

College Admissions

Why does the government require colleges in India to have “objective criteria” for admissions? I understand that such criteria are necessary for government-owned or run or aided colleges where there’s scope for rent seeking. But why is it that “private” colleges are also forced to adopt “objective criteria” such as board exam marks or entrance test scores for admission?

Abroad, and here, too for MBA admissions, admission is more “subjective”. While of course this has the scope to introduce bias, and is a fairly random process (though I’d argue that the JEE is also a fairly random process), won’t it reduce pressure on the overall student population, and bring in more diversity into colleges?

As a natural experiment I want to see a few state governments deregulating the admissions process for private colleges, making it possible for the colleges to choose their students based on whatever criterion. So what would happen? Of course, some seats would be “reserved” for those with big moneybags. Some more would be reserved for people who are well connected with the college management. But would it be rational for the college boards to “reserve” all the seats this way?

Maybe some colleges would take a short-term view and try to thus “cash out”. The cleverer ones will realize that they need to build up a reputation. So while some seats will be thus “reserved”, others will be used to attract what the college thinks are “good students”. Some might define “good students” to be those that got high marks in board exams. Others might pick students based on how far they can throw a cricket ball. The colleges have a wide variety of ways in which to make a name, and they’ll pick students accordingly.

The problem with such a measure is that there is a transient cost. A few batches of students might get screwed, since they wouldn’t have figured out the reputations of colleges (or maybe not – assuming colleges don’t change drastically from the way they are right now). But in a few years’ time, reputations of various sorts would have been built. Colleges would have figured out various business models. The willingness to pay of the collective population would ensure that reasonably priced “seats” are available.

And remember that I mentioned that a few states should implement this, with the others sticking to the current system of regulating admissions and fees and all such. In due course of time it’ll be known what works better. Rather, it’ll be known what the students prefer.

It’s crazy that colleges now require students to get “cent per cent” in their board exams as a prerequisite to admission. It’s crazy that hundreds of thousands of students all over India, every year, spend two years of their prime youth just preparing to get into a good college (nowadays the madness is spreading. A cousin-in-law is in 9th standard, and he’s already joined JEE coaching). On reflection, it’s crazy that I wasted all of my 12th standard simply mugging, for an exam that would admit me to a college that I knew little about. Madness, sheer madness.

Dropping out

Less than a semester into my undergrad (Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras) I wanted to drop out, and start work. I didn’t want to be an “engineer”.

I didn’t know why I’d to spend all my Thursday and Friday afternoons filing away at some piece of iron in the “fitting workshop”. I didn’t have the patience to draw three views of a random object in “engineering drawing”.

And I had the reputation of being one of the studdest programmers in my school. Apart from winning competitions here and there and doing well in acads, I had enormous respect from peers for my programming skills. Given that it was a “high-performance school” (which subjected its own 10th standard students to a test before admitting them to 11th) I guess this peer respect does carry some weight.

So, being good at math, and having the reputation of being a stud programmer, I didn’t know what I was doing studying “engineering”. I wanted to be a programmer, and I wanted to drop out and take up a job. My JEE rank counted almost as much as an IIT degree, I thought. I didn’t have the balls, and I continued.

In hindsight, I’m happy I didn’t drop out. By the end of my second year, I knew for sure that I DIDN’T want to be a programmer. While the theoretical aspects of Computer Science excited me (algo analysis and stuff), I had absolutely no patience for “systems”, or “computer engineering”. I was perhaps alone in my class in my love for Microsoft products (easy to use).

I realized then that I liked only the algorithmic aspect of programming, where one solves a (mostly math) problem and codes it up in a simple program. Huge complicated systems-intensive programming, making GUIs etc. didn’t inspire me at all.

Looking back, all that “major” (i.e. Computer Science and Engineering) stuff that I’ve learnt and internalized was learnt in my first two years of engineering. Of course several concepts that are part of CS&E are taught in the last two years, but I ended up not liking any of that.

Looking back, I do find it positive that I did all those “general engineering” courses. I do find it really positive that we had to do 12 compulsory credits in Humanities and Social Sciences, for that allowed me to discover what I was really interested in, and indirectly led me to doing my MBA.

I have only one regret. That I wasn’t able to switch streams sooner than I could. That IIT, being a one-dimensional technology oriented university, didn’t allow me to transfer credits to a course that I would’ve liked better, simply because it offered undergrad courses only in engineering.

There was a humanities department, where I discovered what I was interested in, but unfortunately it was a “minor” department. It’s been partly rectified now, with the setting up of integrated MA courses, in Economics, etc. (if that course existed back when I was studying, there’s a good chance I’d’ve transferred to it from CS&E). But it’s not enough.

Kids at 17 have no clue what they want to do. What we need are flexible full-scale universities, which allow you to switch from any branch to any other branch after two years of reasonably generalized study (the earlier branch can then contribute to “minor” credits). We need to stop putting our colleges in silos such as “engineering”, “arts and science”, etc. Only then would our universities be truly world class, even from an undergraduate point of view.

And looking back, I’m really happy I didn’t drop out.

JEE Results

Exactly ten years ago, they used to give a sum total of 3400 ranks for IIT-JEE. Typically, to get an engineering branch at one of the “big 5” IITs you needed to be in the early 2000s or better. Back then, there were ~40 people from Bangalore who made it to the merit list (I’ve forgotten the exact numbers but if I remember right, at least 30 people from Bangalore JOINED some IIT or the other). About 1.2% of all successful candidates back then were from Karnataka (for IIT/JEE purposes Bangalore = Karnataka since there are no other centres in the state).

JEE results for this year came out yesterday. Most of the second page of today’s The New Indian Express is spent in giving footage to people from Bangalore who got a rank. This year, they gave out 13,100 ranks, of which 58 were from Bangalore – 0.5% of all successful candidates. And you have the New Indian Express which puts the headline “City Students crack IIT by the dozen”. Yeah, five dozen out of thirteen kilopeople is worse than three dozen out of three kilopeople. But anyway…

Back in my days, there was one decently established factory and a couple of fledgling factories in Bangalore. The established factory (a small scale industry by national standards) had 100 students, of which over 30 got ranks in the JEE (and about 20 actually joined IIT). Today the same factory has some 500 students. And surely not more than 58 of its students could have cleared the JEE! And then there are several other factories in the city. Don’t know if any of them have done significantly well.

Madness. Sheer madness. I had written about this before.

Postscript: I must admit there is a small bit of hotteuri (stomach burn) at the amount of footage toppers get nowadays. Back then, it was an advertisement by the coaching factory in all major English dailies in the city, and little else.

Postscript2: This post might sound like one old thatha sitting in his armchair and ranting. It is meant to be that way.

Wasting Youth

Nowadays everyone seems to be preparing for JEE. It is almost as if it is a logical progression to join some JEE coaching factory once you are done with 10th standard. Yeah, the numbers were quite large in my time (~10 yrs back) itself. But they are humongous now, and it is not funny.

Yeah, awareness about IIT and people feeling good about themselves and wanting to go study at India’s best undergraduate institutions is great. It is brilliant. Fantastic. What is not so great, brilliant and fantastic is that tens of thousands of youth are wasting two years of their prime youth trying to mug for an entrance exam in which they stand little chance of doing well.

I just hope I’m not sounding condescending here, but it intrigues me that so many people who have very little chances of making it through the JEE slog so much for it. I think it is due toe the unhealthy equilibrium that has been reached with respect to the exam, which makes everyone waste so much time. Let me explain.

So over the years the JEE has got the reputation of being a “tough” exam. And over the years, maybe due to the way papers are structured or the way factories train people, people have figured out that hard work and extra hours of preparation helps. I could get into studsandfighters mode here but in line with my promise let me try and explain without invoking the framework. And you need to remember that the JEE uses “relative grading” – how well you have done is dependent on how badly others have done.

So if everyone has put in that much extra hard work, you are likely to lose out by not putting in that extra work. And so you increase your effort. And so does everyone else. Yeah this is a single iteration game but still looking at the competition and peer pressure eveyone is forced to raise their effort. Everyone is forced to, to quote the Director of my JEE factory, “work up to human limit”.

Yeah, a few hundred people every year manage to “crack” the system and get through without putting in that much effort. But then their numbers are small compared to the number of people who get admitted, so people who get through based on sheer hard work do tend to get noticed more, and spur other aspirants to work even harder. And so forth.

Yes, there is a problem with a system. Something is not right when a large proportion of youth in the country is wasting away two years of prime youth in preparing for some entrance exam. It is easy to see the fundamental problem – shortage of “really good quality” engineering colleges (I argue that this mad fight for IIT seats shows the gap between IITs and the next level of engineering colleges – at least in terms of public perception). But considering that as given I wonder what we could change. I wonder what we could do in order to save our youth.

As an aside, one thing I’ve noticed about several JEE aspirants is that they don’t give up. I don’t know if this is necessarily a good thing – to carry on with the mad fight even if you know that your chances of making it are remote. Yeah I’m sure there is peer pressure and status issues with respect to giving up. But then I suppose I would have a lot more respect for someone who would give up and enjoy life rather than continue the mad fight knowing fully well that his chances are remote.

Looking back, I do regret wasting those two years in mad JEE mugging. Ok I must admit I did have my share of fun back then but still looking back I would have definitely preferred to have not worked so hard back then. And of course I count myself lucky that I got through the JEE and my hard work in those two years wasn’t in vain.

Pat

I’m not sure if I’d prepared this as an answer to a potential interview question but if I were asked if there was one part of my life which I’d’ve chosen to live differently, I’d probably pick my four years at IIT Madras. In many respects, it represents some kind of a void in my life. Nothing much of note happened during that. It was during that time that I learnt to put NED. There wasn’t much value added to my life in those four years, either in terms of actual value or even in terms of bullet points. There was not much “growth” in those years.

I did nothing of note in terms of academics (I ended up as class median) and apart from a bit of quizing not much in the lit scene either. I didn’t go out on too many trips, nor did I go out too much. You might be surprised to know that I’ve never in my life watched a movie at a movie hall in Chennai! I went to Besant Nagar beach thrice during my four year stay, and to the Marina Beach once. I played only a peripheral role in organizing Saarang and Shaastra, and that too only in the latter half of my stay there.

On several occasions I’ve asked myself what kept me going through those four years that I consider to be my “dark days”, and the only reasonable answer that I get is “pat”. Pat. Sri Gurunath Patisserie. The coffee shop of IIT. The life and blood of my life at IIT. Perhaps the only thing I really missed about IIT when I moved to IIMB. The venue for much discussion, and fun, and bitchery, and long nights. Open air. Bad chairs. Broken tables. Non-existtent umbrellas. Breeze. Cheap and horrible nescafe. 5 Rupis lemonade. Etecetera.

When bitching about my life at IIT, I usually lay most of the blame on the fact that I was put in a mostly PG hostel. However, one advantage of being in Marnad was that it was right opposite Patisserie, and so it took little effort to go park there. I suppose it was no coincidence that the most prolific Pat-ers (Bhaand, Shamnath and I) were all Narmadites.

It was really simple. All that one had to do when bored was to walk across and go buy yourself a cup of Nescafe for 5 rupis. And park. If you found an interesting gumbal, you would park with them. If not you would park alone, and an interesting enough gumbal would build up around you as time went by. People kept coming and people kept going but the conversation would go on for a while. And some time in the middle, Satcho would materialize and molest Mani, the dog that had been much fattened on the Patisserie leftovers.

It was at the Patisserie that the editors of The Fourth Estate would meet the correspondents and collect ideas for bitchy stories. It was at the Patisserie that plots were hatched to bring down The Fourth Estate and start the rival (shortlived) Total Perspective Vortex. It was at the Patisserie that campus couples announced themselves (though after a while action in this regard moved to “spot” near the girls’ hostel). It was at Patisserie that cheap treats were given and cheap bets were settled.

It was at the Patisserie that I first started making Pertinent Observations, and telling them to people around me. When I didn’t have access to Patisserie any more, I started this blog.

Earlier, when people told me about the crazy things they’d done in their undergrad and all the fun they had, I’d feel bad. I’d feel bad that I’d missed out on something. Now I just ask myself if I’d’ve traded my sessions at the Patisserie for the “fun” things that they’d done. And the answer, usually, is no.

The Swarovski Earrings

On Friday evening I tweeted:

Louis philippe best white shirt – rs X1
Swarovski crystal earrings – rs X2
Dinner at taj west end – rs X3
Proposal accepted – priceless

Now I must confess that there was a lie. Which I tried to mask by using variables for the various values. Of course, at the time of tweeting this, I didn’t know the value of X3; though I figured it out an hour later. The value of X1 is well known. The lie was in the X2 bit. The thing is I don’t know. Because the Swarovski crystal earrings weren’t bought; they were won.

Back in 2000 when I entered IIT Madras, I started doing extremely bad in quizzes there. It took me a long while to get adjusted to the format there (long questions, all-night quizzes… ) and a lot of stuff that got asked there was about stuff that I didn’t care much about so I didn’t really bother doing well. There’s this old joke that every IITM quiz should start and end with a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) question with two more LOTR questions in the middle, and all this is only in one half of the quiz.

In my first year there, there was also the additional problem of finding good people to quiz with. You invariably ended up going with someone either from your hostel or your class who might have attended their school trials for the Bournvita Quiz Contest, or sometimes quizzers you know from Bangalore. Still, the lack of a settled team meant that there was a cap on how well one could do. All through first year, I didn’t qualify in a single quiz, neither in Madras nor when I came home to Bangalore.

Second year was marginally different. There was still no settled team but the format wasn’t strange any more. And quizzes had started to get a little more general and less esoteric. I had started to qualify, or just miss qualification, in some quizzes. And around this time, while struggling with VLSI circuits and being accused by the Prof of being potential WTC Bombers (this was a few days after 9/11) I heard God and Ranga talk about some Dakshinachitra where they had qualified for the finals.

So Dakshinachitra is this heritage center on East Coast Road and they had been conducting an India Quiz. It was a strange format – three rounds of prelims with two teams (of two people) qualifying from each round. God and Ranga had gone for the first round of prelims and had sailed through. They had told me the competition hadn’t been too tough and so the following week Droopy and I headed out, taking some random local bus to the place.

We too made it peacefully to the finals and then found that it had turned out to be an all-IIT finals. However, they refused to shift the venue of the finals to the IIT campus and so all of us had to brave the Saturday afternoonMadras sun and head out again to the place. Thankfully this time they’d organized a bus from somewhere close to IIT.

I don’t remember too much of the finals apart from the fact that there was a buzzer round with extremely high stakes, in which Droopy and I did rather well. I remember one question in the buzzer round being cancelled because an audience member shouted out the answer. I remember there was this fraud-max specialist round where we were quizzed on a topic we’d picked beforehand. Thankfully the stakes there weren’t too high. It wasn’t a great quiz by general quizzing standards but what mattered was we won, marginally ahead of God and Ranga in a close finish.

The next morning Droopy and I appeard in the supplement pages of the New Indian Express, holding this huge winner’s certificate with Air India’s name on it (they took back that certificate as soon as the photo was taken). We were promised one return ticket each by Air India to any destination in some really limited list, but somehow they frauded on it and we could never fly. God and Ranga got a holiday each in some resort, and I don’t think they took that, too.

There were a lot of random things as prizes. There were some random old music CDs. Maybe some movie CDs too. I remember God and Ranga getting saris (god (not God, maybe God also) knows what they did with it). Droopy and I got coupons from VLCC. I put NED to encash them. Droopy went and was given a free haircut. And then there were these earrings.

Not knowing what to do with them, I just gave them to my mother. She, however, refused to wear them saying that since I’d won them, it was only appropriate that they go to my wife. So she put them away in the locker in my Jayanagar house and told me to take them out only when I had decided who I wanted to marry. And I, then a geeky 18-year old IITian, had decided to use these earrings while proposing marriage.

So early in the evening on Friday I went to the Jayanagar house and took the earrings out of the locker. What followed can be seen in the tweet. Oh, and now you might want to start following this blog.

PS: apologies for the extra-long post, but given the nature of the subject I suppose you can’t blame me for getting carried away

Relationships and IIT

So the basic premise of this post is that being in a romantic relationship is like studying at IIT.

Everyone wants to get into IIT. They do thipparlaaga to try and get in. They join expensive coaching classes. Some of them even move cities. They wait for several years giving multiple attempts. People work extremely hard. Still, success is not guaranteed. There is that luck factor. There is the day’s performance that matters. Some days are important than others. Cracking the JEE is a “discrete” job.

While preparing for JEE, everyone thinks that if they clear the exam, their life is made. They come under the impression that after JEE, life will become smooth. That they won’t need to put any fight for the rest of their lives. That all that matters for their future is their cracking the JEE. And so forth.

It’s only after people come to IIT that they realize that life is not the cakewalk they assumed it to be. It is only after they get there that they realize that life after JEE is quite hard. That it is necessary to work hard. That if they don’t work hard, they will do very badly, and might flunk. It is only when they get to IIT that it hits them. Some learn quickly but others get disillusioned and give up in life. Several people do badly. Some even drop out.

So it’s similar with a romantic relationship. Everyone wants to get into a romantic relationship. Everyone looks only about the “entrance examination”. Everyone believes (before they get in) that life ban jaayegi after they get into a relationship. And getting into a relationship is a “discrete” job. It’s about how you “perform” during those blading sessions. It takes that bit of luck. It takes those set of fateful events to happen together in that precise coincidence.

And it is only when you get into a relationship that you realize how hard it is (provided you haven’t been there before). It is like being in IIT all over again. You know that you will need to work really hard to keep it going (applies to both parties). It is a continuous job, and you need to continuously “perform”. The randomness is much smaller than it is during the “relationship acquisition” phase. However, you necessarily need to work hard. There is no “stud way out”. Some people give up when they find this out and break up (drop out). Others understand and put in the requisite effort and sustain the relationship. And continue to work hard.

The thing with arranged marriages is that you are typically forced to commit as soon as you’re done with “evaluating” the other person. You don’t get to test the counterparty on their ability to work hard and keep things going. It is like offering someone a job as soon as he has cleared the JEE.

And I wonder if one can draw an analogy between marriage and (academic) tenure.

The Eighty-Twenty Rule

I first got this idea during some assignment submission at IIT. One guy in our class, known to be a perfectionist is supposed to have put in 250 hours of effort into a certain course project. He is known to have got 20 out of 20 in this project. I put in about 25 hours of effort into the same project and got 17. Reasonable value for effort, I thought. And that was when I realized the law of diminishing returns to effort. And that was the philosophy I carried along for the rest of my academic life (the following four years).

The problem with working life as opposed to academic life is that the eighty-twenty formula doesn’t work. The biggest problem here is that you are working for someone else, while you were essentially working for yourself while you wree a student. Eighty was acceptable back then, it is not acceptable now. Even if you are working for yourself, the problem is that the completion-rewards curve is completely diffferent now.

Imagine a curve with the percentage of work done the X axis and the “reward” on the Y axis. In an academic setting, it is usually linear. Doing 80% of the work means that you are likely to get 80%. Fantastic. The problem wiht work is that the straight line gets replaced by a convex curve. So even to get an 80% reward, you will need to maybe do 99% of the work. The curve moves up sharply towards the end so as to give 100% reward for 100% work (note that I’m talking about work done here, not effort. Effort is irrelevant)

Now, why did I cap reward at 100% in the previous paragraph? Why did I assume that there is a “maximum” amount of wokr that can be done? Note that if there is a ceiling to the amount of work to be done, and to the reward, then you are looking at a payoff like a bond – the upside is limited – 100% but the downside is unlimited (yeah I know it’s limited at 0, but it is so far away from 100% that it can be assumed to be infinitely far away). Trying hard, doing your best each time, the best you do is 100%. But slip up a bit, and you will get big deficits. It is like the issuer of the bond defaulting.

Almost thirty years back, Michael Milken noticed this skewed payoff structure for bonds, and this led him to invent “junk bonds”, which are now more politely known as “high yield debt”. Now, these bonds were structured (basically high leverage) such that a reasonably high rate of default was built in. In an ordinary bond the “default expectation” is that the bond won’t default at all. For a high-yield bond, the “default expectation of default” is much higher than 0 – so there is a definite upside if the bond doesn’t default. So that balances the payoffs.

So how does that translate to work situations? You need to basically get yourself a job where there is significant scope for doing “something extra”. So that if you take into account the “something extra”, the “expectation” will be say something like 90% of the work. So by doing only a bit more than your old 80-20 rule from college, you can fulfil expectations. And occasionally even beat them, resulting in a major positive payoff (either in terms of money or reputation or power etc.).

The deal is that when the expectation is lower than 100%, the reward-work curve changes. It remains heavily convex for the duration within the expectation (so if expectation is 90% of work for 80% of profit, the curve will be highly convex in the {(0,90),(0,80)} area). And beyond this, it gets less convex and closer to linearity, and so gives you a bit more freedom.

I’m too lazy to draw the curves so you’ll have to imagine them in your heads. And you can find some info on convex curves here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_function

Slender Loris and Punny Animal Names

I think one of my cousins ( a very young fellow) looks like a Slender Loris, and refer to him by that name. Unfortunately, I can’t make the nickname official because of a punny reason.

The Kannada word for Slender Loris is “Kaadupaapa” which is supposed to mean “baby of the forest” or some such thing. The problem arises with the word “Kaadu” which can refer to both forest and as “troublesome”. I suppose the reason for these diverse meanings is some sort of root meaning “wild”.

So Kaadupaapa can also mean “troublesome baby”. There’s more to it. “Kaadupaapa” also happens to be a fairly common abuse that is directed at young kids when they get too troublesome. I clearly remember my mother abusing me using this phrase a few times when I was small. So nicknaming a young boy as Kaadupaapa would be similar to some guy in IIT being given a nickname such as “bastard” or “chutiya”. And clearly the parents of the kid will not approve and the baptist will end up getting a bad name in their eyes.

This unfortunate combination of circumstances means that I can’t make official what I think is a splendid nickname. At least, in IIT I didn’t have to bother about what the parents of the boys would think about the nicknames that I’d dole out, which enabled me to dish out a few decent ones. Though I admit that a conspiracy by the institute to deny freshies to Narmada Hostel meant that there weren’t too many people I could have named.

Location matters

The other day in my office we were discussing recruitment. I pointed out that placements this year in the IITs have been particularly screwed. We haven’t decided if we can wait till July for the new recruits to join, but if we agree that it’s ok, we might recruit from IIT. Given our size and meagre requirements, if we do recruit, it’s likely to be from IIT Delhi. The CEO happens to be from there, but that won’t be the reason we might be going there. It is simply to do with cost.

A number of people think that good colleges can lead development. I’m not sure if that is the case. Unless there is a massive cluster of colleges that comes up in some place which makes it attractive for people to set up industries, which can then recruit from the colleges. Until that happens, and you never know how long it will take for that to happen, the students in these colleges are effectively screwed. At least much more screwed than those in colleges in better locations.

For big companies it doesn’t matter. Their recruitments are such that they can’t possibly make do with taking people from the closest IIT (since we’ve started talking about IITs, let’s keep that as the standard). They will need to go to every IIT. And recruit from all the places, irrespective of how much it costs them to recruit from there. So you will have people talking about big names that go to different IITs. Big companies with big names. I don’t think there will be significant inter-IIT difference in there.

However, where the students of remotely-placed IITs will miss out on is in terms of small, and maybe growing companies. Companies such as ours. We are located in Gurgaon, and might not need more than a couple of people. And from a simple cost perspective, there is no reason we should step out of Delhi for our IIT Campus recruitment. If we were located in Bangalore or Madras, and wanted to recruit from an IIT, we would’ve gone to IITM. It is about cost. Total cost of recruitment, measured against expected quality of candidates. So we go to the closest and most accessible IIT.

During my time at IITM (2000-2004), there were hardly any non-software companies that came to recruit. There were a few “big boys” that came (McKinsey, Levers, etc.) but they were large enough to go to every IIT. Not-so-large financial sector companies that were based in Bombay would simply just recruit from IITB. Outsourcing companies based in Gurgaon would go to IITD. The south had (and has) mostly software companies, and they would recruit from Madras.

Then there is the accessibility factor. Now, if I were to decide that my requirements won’t be fully met at IITD, and I want to recruit from a couple of more IITs, I would probably intuitively go to Bombay and Madras. Simply because they are well connected by flight from Delhi, and have good hotels to stay at if I want to interview over a couple of days. I’m not even sure if Kanpur and Kharagpur have airports. And I definitely don’t fancy staying at hotels in either of these places.

Popular notion is that IITs at Bombay and Delhi have traditionally had superior placements compared to other IITs. It is simply because they are located in superior places (Madras might have also been there but for some reason has historically shown a tendency to send most of its graduates to the US, because of which local recruiters don’t fancy it too much). Even if you are the smartest guy in Kanpur or Kharagpur, there is a good chance that you might lose out to a much less smart and much less hardworking guy than you in Bombay or Delhi. Simply because they are more accessible.

There is of course the contrarian viewpoint. Low supply of jobs at the less urban IITs means that as a recruiter, I should find it easier to get better people there, than I would in the IITs in the big cities. Again, it depends on how much incremental value I place on the “better students” at the less urban IITs. In most cases, however, it is likely that I would find that this incremental value wouldn’t justify my costs, and end up going to an urban IIT.

So who would recruit from the urban IITs? Apart from the big guns, of course. Think of institutions that don’t require a face-to-face interview for recruitment. Graduate schools. Large software companies which recruit without interviews (based on a test, etc.). Foreign companies that interview via videoconference. And I hear that nowadays, McKinsey has started flying down its shortlisted students from non-Bombay non-Delhi IITs to its own office and interviewing them there – maybe a few other extremely quality-conscious companies might emulate this model.

So if you have just passed the JEE, and don’t know which IIT to go to, you might want to keep this in mind. I know that at 17, you want to go to the IIT closest to home (at least, that is the reason I picked Madras). But keep this at the back of your mind – going to an IIT in a bigger city is definitely going to give you better options after your engineering. If you are extremely sure that you want to do a PhD in your chosen branch of engineering, then it doesn’t matter. Go anywhere. But if you want to keep your options open, go to the big cities. Bombay. Delhi. Madras.

PS1: In this post I have used IITs as only an indicative example. This applies to all colleges, irrespective of area of study. Basic moral of this essay is that if you have a choice between similar colleges of similar reputation, choose the one in the bigger city

PS2: I have no clue about our recruitment plans. I don’t even know if we will recruit. If you are a placement representative, please DON’T bombard me with “can you recruit from my IIT” mails. If we want to recruit from your college, we will get in touch with you.

PS3: Has any of you observed that if you consider Kharagpur as being close to Calcutta, the location of the 5 IITs are the same as the five cities where Test cricket was played in India in the 1950s. Maybe if Kharagpur hadn’t come up in 1950 itself, it would’ve been set up somewhere close to Eden Gardens.