Top 100....98

I was walking down my department steps when i looked down towards the basement. Long time back I used to wonder whats there....my sister had told me that a big lab's there and the whole basement is full of machines n equipments!

Today I knew what was there, I had been down many times and seen the 'big' lab ;-). I was there to take a few pics for the department website last month and luckily got to see the whole lab. It had couple of lathes (few really old n few new), some milling machines, some grinding machines, a drilling machine, 2 welding areas, a small classroom fitted with machine vice's for 1st year students and a small room for carpentary. There was an CNC machine and i know somewhere there wud be an EDM or something better. Around this lab there were smaller labs for chemistry, Material testing and some specialized labs for professors to conduct some research experiments. As I walked down thinking all this, it suddenly reminded me of my btech at SCT college of engineering, Trivandrum. I had seen these machines some 4 yrs back and worked on them then. Unconsiously i started to compare the labs of the 2 colleges.

I stopped walking and looked at my shadow ahead of me. What was i doing????? what was i even thinking???? i'm comparing a college in US to a engg college in Trivandrum... I was comparing a 100+ yr old college in US to a 11 yr old engg college in Kerala! Had I gone crazy ??????

So i continued walking thinking about SCT and NITC. SCT was a new college, had to develop all the infrastructure from scratch, get the machines, bldgs, etc etc.. while NITC was an old and well known college in India. But was NITC keeping up?????? I thought colleges like SCT had made a huge progress in 10 yrs of their coming into existence. SCT started in 1995 and it had nearly all the machines that we needed for our Btech degree. It was fast in getting everything set up and working. I may say that faculty was not that great but then again i never listend to them to comment! practically i learned Btech on my own.. and huge credit goes to all my friends with whom I discovered how gears, cams, shafts, lathes etc etc etc worked. We had our own thumb rules for every subject and I think i can write a whole blog on that ;-)

So there I was half way home thinking about colleges like NITC n KSU who have a big name and autonomy but are they making progress????? atleast that was not very visible. I could see some when i was in NITC and it was just changing over from REC to NITC. Apart from that I dint see any changes or much research going on. Similarly in KSU where i'm currently I dont see much... the infrastructure is great... facutly is good... so is the research... but are these colleges steadily making improvement? Are these colleges following the KAIZEN pattern of continuous improvement??????

I reached home and logged on to the internet and saw an mail in my NITC groups that our college is 28th in India based on a survey conducted by Outlook. I went over to the top 100 engineering colleges in India and saw that the top 10 were basically IIT's, BITS n IT-BHU. Saw a lot of REC/NIT's in and around top 30 including NITC. I went down the list searching for CET since it was amongst the most reputed college in kerala and I was surprised to see it at 48th spot. Though not very great but still it was in the top 50! So i logged off thinking CET has done Trivandrum proud.. but it cud go higher in the list.

A few hours later.. my friend called up n said "Congrats"... your college is in the top 100. I corrected him that I was not from CET but from SCT which is no where even close to top 100. He said..."you are in...look at 98"!!!!!