How to survive NSIT?

Varun Gupta
Sep 5, 2018 · 6 min read
Hate it or love it?

What this is?

This is advice, based off the experience I gained in my time here which I am putting out so that someone out there does not make the same mistakes that I made and believe me I made a lot of them. These are the tips I would give to my freshman self(like that is possible) now, having seen quite some myths bust.

What this isn’t?

This is not a campus tour or life at NSIT blog, I am by no means a society person so please excuse me for the occasional bias. If you are looking for canteen and hangout spot recommendations there is no point reading further.

Who am I?

My name is Varun Gupta, I am currently a 3rd year Information Technology student at NSIT(as if that wasn’t already obvious :P). I have interned with Coding Blocks, Udacity and Google summer of code apart from a lot of projects and open source contributions. Currently I have an offer for summer internship from 2 companies including Expedia group. You can find me here.

Okay enough with the introductions, I’ll start now.

CGPA

CGPA does not represent your skills or intelligence in any way. Agreed! But,

IT MATTERS, please don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Marks do matter, whether you want to pursue higher studies or placements in top companies CGPA is a major filtering criteria and you should absolutely focus on academics. This does not mean that you should run out to buy all the books and start ghisai(Trying to use the NSIT lingo :P), infact I was thouroughly surprised by how well you can score without putting in a hell lot of effort. The mantra to get marks is go to class and listen. (Duh?)

Okay who am I kidding, you already know that, but who wants to go to class, right? The idea is that your professors should know you, by name. This will help you a lot both with internal assessments and research projects(if you want to pursue MS). After all it won’t harm to be in the professor’s good books (at least the permanent faculty of your department). This was one my biggest mistakes which came back to bite me, I screwed up my first 2 semesters in terms of GPA and even after scoring 8.9 in the following semesters my aggregate is still 8, which prevented me from sitting for some of the best companies for internship on campus.

You can never put a number on these things but in my experience 8.5 is a good enough GPA which can be scored without exceptional efforts. General rule is that try to be in the top 30% of your batch and you should be pretty much fine. Again try to not burn yourself out on this too much, or else you would not be able to code which is really important (Duh!).

Competitive coding or Software development

This is an age old dilemma which you will face as soon as you enter NSIT. I chose the second camp and while I would not call this a mistake, it could have been handled better. So here’s the thing, both sides have perks and both are important, you would find that in fact there is no comparison between these. Computer fundamentals are really important and you should absolutely not move to dev side without a very good command on fundamentals (I took a course at coding blocks for this). After this it really comes down to balance (like everything else in life), I have a simple solution DO BOTH

But how?

Glad you asked!

As far as competitive programming is concerned, it’s all about practice, pick a platform and just go at it every once in a while. Just make sure you are not out of practice, speed is the key factor here.

Software development, at least for me is far more interesting and this is where I spent almost all of my time, this enabled me to crack Google Summer of Code and other internships off campus. This builds your resume, so whenever someone will look at it, this will give you the edge (Yes I mean interviews and off campus applications).

Societies

Let’s get this settled once and for all, Nobody gives a damn about your PORs. Societies are meant for fun and that’s what you should treat them as. Join a society to learn something that you always wanted to learn or to meet new people but don’t have unrealistic expectations as to how much that POR is worth, coz trust me it’s worth nothing. You would be much better off doing projects if you have the time.

Campus Recruitment

Hello! (to the people who skipped right to this :P) I’ll try to connect all the dots I made above in this section(so please go back and read them lol). Here’s what the process looks like:

  • Firstly, people are shortlisted on the basis of CGPA. Trust me you won’t wanna miss out on this. Remember top 30%.
  • Secondly there is an online coding round which majorly has coding questions(likes of which you will find on geeksforgeeks and hackerrank) and mcqs based off common coding topics. This is where your competitive coding experience helps since you have to make test cases pass in a time limit (speed matters!).
  • Finally, some 10–15 people are selected for interviews, while this depends a lot on the kind of interviewer you are dealing with but generally speaking your resume can give you the edge here. Don’t get me wrong, you will be asked data structures, algorithms and other interview topics no matter what but how many will depend on your resume. If you have a weak resume with no projects the interviewer has no option but to ask Algorithms. On the other hand a strong resume gives the interviewer a lot to ask from. For me personally, at expedia I was asked about 60% resume and 40% other topics(I really like pep coding’s interview preparation course for this).

Conclusion

So all that is left to say is don’t stress too much (A little is good though :P), college like almost any other phase of life is more about the process than the product. so don’t forget to have fun. There is no one solution that fits all though, you might not do one or more of the above things and still get phenomenal results, this is my experience and yours might turn out to be different.

PS Please don’t lash out on me if you don’t share my views on one or more of these things, you can always write your own post :P


Originally published at gist.github.com.

Varun Gupta

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Foodie | Tech Enthusiast | Wanderer | Creator | Friends❤️

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