IIT’s undeniably enjoy their autonomy! The varied internship opportunities provided by them happen to be a major outcome of this independence. Two months ago, IIT Delhi revised its internship programme and made it optional. In other words, students from IIT Delhi can now avail the internship anytime after the second year upto the final year.

This change at IIT Delhi was brought about after a curriculum alteration that happened in July 2015. In the new curriculum, required course credits took a beating and shrunk from 180 to a mere 145-155, depending on the department requirements, plus 15 non-graded credits.

Prof Anurag Sharma, Academic Dean of IIT Delhi said “Out of the 15 non graded credits, 5 will be for reserved for the internship programme, which is introduced as ‘Design and Practical Experience’, in the revised curriculum. Students can earn 2 non-graded credits for summer internship and 5 non– graded credits for a whole semester internship.”

The optional direction does seem like a fitting answer to today’s needs where anyone and everyone wants to become an entrepreneur. Interestingly other IITs also have optional internship programmes but they are styled in a different way. As an example, IIT Bombay’s internship programme is optional in the real sense. Shubham Goyal, a Mechanical Engineering student at IIT Bombay, explained that there is a complete choice on whether to do an internship; take up a project of one’s own choice or do nothing at all.

But those IIT’s that still follow the traditional internship style have their reasons too. For instance, IIT Kharagpur believes that students must do an internship to get some experience of the outside world. According to students, they have the liberty of choosing the genre of internship, which varies from the corporate sector, PSU’s to the IT sector. Vyom Shrivastava, a third year student explained that “apart from the freedom to work anywhere, IIT Kharagpur gives students’ credits on the basis of the project report submitted at the end of the programme. We are pushed to do at least some work and utilise our time here”.

Even though internship programs differ from one IIT to another, students still prefer internships in the conventional sense – and that is because they come with pre-placement offers. That’s still a big draw for students though today creating one’s own company is as big as a pull as getting a good placement.