4 years that didn’t matter: The diary of a BTech graduate
Curled up in my bed at 1 am with my blanket shielding me from questions, and only a laptop screen illuminating my face, my fingers hitting the refresh button in rhythm — there have been times when I have questioned why it was okay to stay up this late into the night, only when it came to matters involving university results.
The scene that I just described is one that’s straight out of the untold diary of an engineering student belonging to a Tamil Nadu university that gets its name from one of the state’s most popular leaders; his name is disyllabic. Memories of hitting the refresh button at 1 am when the rest of the world sleeps while we waited patiently for results that wouldn’t show up till 4 am doesn’t just make me nostalgic, but induces a side of trauma as well.
When you finish high school and move to college, you don’t make an effort to keep in touch with the education bubble that you just exited; it’s beyond you. It doesn’t matter anymore. The same goes for when you graduate college — your Alma Matter becomes an acquaintance that you used to hang out with. And there aren’t too many instances that take you back to the days when you used to travel a good hour and a half to a college that was supposedly in ‘Chennai’ but was in fact in another state; you don’t have too many triggers; the triggers are locked up in a closet with memories that question the purpose of four years you spent in a world learning nothing you’d ever put to use.
That was just me going on a spiral about my four years of engineering in Chennai. Flipping through the pages of a few local papers, I found myself getting sucked into a report about how the state university’s engineering results have dropped. The results were announced last week, and it turns out that there has been a drop in results about 15% to 20% this year. A report by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) released last year stated that 60% of the eight lakh engineers graduating from technical institutions across the country remained unemployed. The National Employability Report from 2016 ranked Tamil Nadu at the bottom in employability in the engineering sector.
It’s strange how reports like these never seem to get to parents of high schoolers who put together research material about why a certain Chennai college is the best in the country, or why studying mechanical engineering in a world filled with computers would ensure a job right after graduation.
It’s strange how parents in Chennai never seem to take note of the fact that in a neighbourhood that they reside in, it’s impossible to throw last night leftovers on the road without some of it falling on a few unemployed engineers; while the parents continue to send their own to college because in the words of the great Chennai neighbour whose name remains unknown, whose credibility remains questionable, who loves outdated platitudes and rhetoric, and who clearly has a lot of free time — “Engineering is always the best option.”
Bhargav Prasad
Twitter@CFLlightSabers
The writer specializes in first drafts, making observations on what makes Chennai, Madras