Growing with you: Campus Appreciation

“Whoa! There’s an IIT in Tirupati?”
“It’s a 3rd Gen IIT after all.”
“The only IITs that really matter are the top 7!”
“Why did you even choose this IIT?”

“Why”

“This”

“IIT”

Those words always ring in your head. You and me, both. You are sick and tired of hearing it again and again. One fine day, you decide that you will not take any more of it. You, against all odds, set out to tell everyone why you’re glad it’s this IIT after all.

(Sure, you didn’t quite feel that way in your freshman year. But as the years go by and your degree is at the verge of completion, you are in just the right place to look back and appreciate what you got.)

The author is a tired soul. He is tired and frankly, disheartened to hear the perennial river of complaints, nitpicks and criticisms about his institute. He wishes to be one of the few who may very well have those complaints but also have them overshadowed by the appreciation they have for this institute. As he nears the end of his degree, the author hopes to reflect on his journey and lament on his not-so-new-found appreciation for the place that gave his B.Tech dreams a home.

This institute was once confined to a 30-acre piece of land encircled by a road. Lovingly and forever called the “transit campus” (Who even calls it the South Campus?), this was home to some of us when we came here.

Why transit? Well, this space was the transition from IIT Tirupati’s old residence to its permanent one. With a grand total of 1 CRC, 2 buildings with labs, 4 hostels, 1 shop, 1 library, 1 CC-Lab, 1 mess, just 22 classrooms and 1 neem tree, it was our first home. Anywhere your heart wished to take you could be reached within 10 minutes of walking (don’t ask me how we still managed to make it late to classes).

The buildings were intertwined with creepers and climbers (both figuratively and literally) and the local shrubbery shone in between the concrete. The atmosphere was almost always calming and the toughest sunny days demanded that you run to hide under the nearest overgrown tree (about 3 metres from your current location). Home wasn’t much, but it was ours and it was beautiful.

An almost ethereal backdrop of the mountain range accompanied us wherever we went and even though there were a lot of people, it was always bustling but never crowded. It always felt like home. Why? At home, your bookshelf and your water bottle and your favourite notebook aren’t in different rooms. Everything you want and care about is within arm's reach.

After all that, we had to shift homes.

Now, home isn’t a place anymore. Home is the people we found along the way. Home is the friends we made along the way. We better have made friends, because with the sheer size of the campus, it’s easy to not run into anyone.

Now, the campus spans a modest 350 acres or so, with a host of new buildings and places that joined in —

• Two department buildings decked out with the latest in high-tech bells and whistles. No kidding, each classroom in these buildings uses 10 lakhs worth of tech alone, just for classroom activities. This is without considering the CCFs, with some truly beefy computers and some cute macintoshes to contrast, and the department labs. The Computational labs, each with a cumulative 250+ cores and logical processors, are definitely THE state-of-the-art labs one can find today. The Practical labs are no less, with experimental setups from the likes of Gunt Hamburg and only the finest in precision machining, straight from the production lines of DMG MORI.


• A dedicated LHC complex that takes the “very expensive top-notch classroom” concept and applies a “how about many of those? And on multiple floors that too!” modification to it.


• A CIF, where, get this, the high-tech equipment is supposed to go. The Central Instrumentation Facility is yet to be fully populated and is supposed to be THE building for technology and innovation.


• A beautiful Director’s office, complete with a fabulous view out the windows, 50 metres above the ground, and an entire Administrative Building below it.


• Lastly, a duo of elegant hostels that stole fire (single occupancy) from the Gods (PhD scholars) and gave it to humans (B.Tech students).

All of that has come to be within the two years that we’ve spent on campus. We’ve watched it grow to accommodate more people and more facilities. Maybe it is the fastest growing IIT after all. While we have grown, the ever-elusive backdrop remains and the fresh air of flora always surrounds us, no matter where we go. If anything, the campus has grown more picturesque, just with higher vantage points.

Despite the size of the campus and its deceivingly large crowd, the classrooms aren’t too dense. With some electives having as low as 3 or 4 students and an average strength of 15~20, each student has a say in how the class proceeds and gets to interact personally with faculty.

Additionally, professors find it much easier to allocate time and interact with their students, allowing for tutorials that are actually interactive and classes that do not feel the same as watching a recorded lecture.

This sense of “approachability” is exclusive to growing institutions that do not have a large student population and is a blessing in disguise for those wanting to make the best use of the resources available to them. As an added boost, the low strength allows for frequent group activities and projects that would otherwise not be handled directly by the professors.

This low population density presents its advantages in other aspects of campus life. Extracurricular activities are defined, and precedents are set by the students of today. If a club wants to be called Nisarga, it gets to be called Nisarga, and it will stay so for the years to come, unless another revolutionary has a different vision. The campus is a blank canvas and it’s up to us to paint, draw and decorate it however we please. If students want hostels to be named after Indian Classical Ragas, then so it shall be. Traditions are yet to set in, because 5 years may be a lot for a B.Tech student, but 5 years is not even outside the nascent period of an institution like an IIT. This “freedom” to establish student culture, is a grave responsibility that most of us don’t realise until it’s a little too late.

This freedom also has a secret side-effect. It forces people to step up. In a typical university club, the average member gets to design a poster here and set up some equipment there, summing up their contribution for a semester. However, because of the low strength here, the average member is no longer an average member. They become one of the 3 shaky legs that keep a high-functioning club up and running.

This forces people to leave behind their hesitation, leave behind their crowds, step out of their comfort zone and express who they are on a stage that matters. There’s no fear of going unheard and lost among a thousand voices. The exposure to structured management and teamwork at its most chaotic is unique to an IIT that’s still stretching its wings when it comes to extracurricular activities.

As there isn’t much competition for top spots in teams and groups, it’s relatively easy to get into the core functioning circles of clubs and teams, which gives the average student a much higher chance for great exposure before student pastimes are replaced by excruciating jobs or unforgiving graduate level education.

We end with a note that is fitting for an old grandpa in a vintage-fashioned armchair to say.

“People care”.

It may not be evident in many cases, and it may be hidden behind a lot of layers in other cases, but people care. The people who are trying their best to get clean water to hostels, care. The people who are trying to get us superfast Wi-Fi with a steady connection, care. The people who are trying to help us learn and explore new things, care. The people who are trying to make sure this campus stays picturesque, clean and safe, care. The people who are managing the administrative affairs, care.

It’s simply a matter of going out and actually interacting with these people.

As of writing this article, the issues that are often complained about are not looking too bad. The last water-related issue was weeks ago, Wi-Fi is available somewhat uniformly, placements are actually looking up compared to the previous years, student-run activities are getting newer-and-straight forward ways to spend student money and overall, life is starting to feel like the other side, with the greener grass that is.

As a 4th year student who studied his dream field throughout his B.Tech years, who got to experience a plethora of extracurricular activities, who got to meet an extraordinary bunch of people, who got to see and learn how an institute is run and maintained and who got to do a little bit of everything that this IIT had to offer, I can safely say that this experience has been so much more than those bad days when somehow, this institute seemingly did not live up to its name.