The newly born IIT, IIT Tirupati, one of the sisters of the mentoring institute IIT Madras, started functioning from August 5, 2015.

The new semester began with orientation class. There was a warm welcome to the pioneer batch, which has people from most Indian states. Even though we are the pioneer batch, I did not find any hassle. The hostels are superb, better than I expected. The transit instructional infrastructure is also pretty good with labs and lecture rooms. The college staff are skilled and no one can even imagine that a new IIT may be this good. The faculty are highly experienced professors from other national institutes, mostly from IIT Madras.

A secretary council has been elected. We have good Wi-Fi facility in the campus. In spite of being a brand new institute, the management is concentrated on both studies as well as co-curricular activities. The first event to be celebrated in our institute was Independence Day. The fresher’s night was one of the most memorable events.

Each week we have a session when special lectures on engineering and its importance have been given by the most skilled professors of IIT Madras. We had been taught teamwork, ethics and the importance and need of engineering. Other than these, we are also given time for innovation and creativity. Festivals like Dussera and Diwali have been celebrated with pleasure. On the day of Diwali we visited a nearby orphanage and spent a while with the kids there. We also visited IIT Madras for two days where we had a good time.

Under the NSS programme, we went to government schools for few weekends to teach school students science and maths. The first semester just ended with the end semester exams.

Tirupati is an excellent educational centre with a lot of existing universities and national institutes such as IISER. The government of Andhra Pradesh proposes to make Tirupati a major knowledge hub. Yet another institute (Indian Institute of Information Technology) is also coming up within the vicinity of IIT and IISER.

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