Indian Institute of Technology B.Tech Review By Harisaran Singh

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur is one of the prestigious engineering institutes in India known for its academic excellence, innovative research and good industry connections. IIT Kanpur was established by the Government of India in 1959 and was the fourth IIT to be set up by GOI after IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Madras. The NIRF ranking of this institute in 2023 was 4th in Engineering category and 5th in overall.

IIT Kanpur offers Undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programs in different fields of engineering, science and humanities such as B.Tech / BE, B.Arch, BS and Dual degree programs for Undergraduate students and M.Tech, M.Sc, PhD programs for Postgraduate students. In order to take admission in undergraduate programs one has to qualify JEE Advanced examination which is conducted by one of 7 IITs i.e. IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee, IIT Guwahati and IIT Kharagpur. For postgraduate programs, one has to qualify GATE / NET according to the course they want to pursue. The motive of having a B.Tech / BS degree is to have fundamental knowledge of the branch and enhance problem solving skills and having an M.Tech / PhD degree provides in-depth knowledge and research of that field and to grow leadership skills.

At present, IIT Kanpur has a total of 447 faculty members across different departments. These members are responsible for teaching and guiding the Undergraduate and Postgraduate students from various departments. These faculty members are highly qualified, experienced and specialists of their respective fields. Their way of teaching is just awesome. They allow their students to ask a doubt even in between the lectures, but you have to be polite. The only issue with the faculty is that their grading system is somewhat very tough. I have heard from my batch mates from other IITs about their average grading which is slightly more than that of IIT Kanpur. But the thing that matters is what you have learnt, and you will find the quality of teaching provided by these faculty members better than your expectations.

IIT Kanpur's Placement Cell is known as Student's Placement Office (SPO) which is composed of dedicated staff and students of 3rd, 2nd, and 1st year of B.Tech / BS programs. SPO is highly regarded for its efforts for facilitating successful placement opportunities to students. The SPO team works closely with the recruiters in order to complete the placement procedure smoothly.

The best part of one's life is the hostel life, and it becomes more memorable if you are in IIT Kanpur. IIT Kanpur consists of a total of about 9,500 students including UG and PG students. The hostels of IIT Kanpur have most of the rooms as double seater and some rooms are also triple seater. These hostels provide study rooms, TV rooms and sports facilities such as Table Tennis, Badminton courts, Volleyball courts, Basketball courts and some of them also have their cricket / football ground. These hostels also have a canteen, a shop, and a saloon so that residents should not go outside the campus to buy daily use things.

Having a total campus area of around 1,055 acres, IIT Kanpur has awesome infrastructure. It has an academic block which has 20 air-conditioned classrooms of different sizes with capacity ranging from 100 to 500, tutorial blocks, and the famous PK Kelkar library which fulfils the need of books of students of the entire campus and contains over 2,50,000 books and around 1,900 journals. Every department has its own department building which facilitates the students to study in their respective departments, have faculty apartments and shopping center for the residents and a petrol pump too. The infrastructure of IIT Kanpur provides every possible facility to their residents.

IIT Kanpur is well known for its impassive campus life with numerous clubs and societies in various fields of interest such as cultural, science and technology, sports. Some of the cultural clubs are dance club, music club, drama club, Hindi Sahitya Sabha, fine arts club, English Literary Club and many more. Some of the science and technology clubs are robotics club, aeromodelling club, electronics club, finance club, etc. IIT Kanpur has its cultural fest named Antaragni which has a budget of about Rs.1, 00, 00,000/- annually. Science and technology fests are called Techkirti and the sports fest is Udghos.