Pondicherry Engineering College (PEC) I joined the college in 2004 with a dream of becoming an ECE Engineer. U could imagine the precious moment of a boy with such dreams attending the 1st day of college. There I found some really gud frnds on the very 1st day; of course we all were friends from school. V used to discuss about the future of India and ourselves as a whole.
Days passed and slowly V all started to realize that V were in the wrong place. Lots and lots of sufferings waited to tear our souls into pieces.
The very 1st word from any of the lecturers’ mouth was “U will never get a degree, ” it may sound warning the students, but, they wanted to display their supreme power. V as a group got very much depressed, yet V managed to be in the top five ranks. Shame on those teaching staffs, they rarely visited the class rooms.
We spent most of our time in canteen parallel road. FYI: Our college library had all the books in the world which were at least two decades old, to mention, it also had new books which were almost taken by staff members for their relative engineers. “Browsing Center” does it sounds like the college has all the facility to nurture student’s knowledge? The answer is BIG NO. The number of systems available was 12, in that only 4 system at least boots up, and there too we had one system reserved for staff member (Always occupied). Even a Road Side Biriyani shop will have better facility than that. Hygiene is Almost NIL.
The lab assistants were the small GODs. We literally begged them to make the computers work. They were so careless and lazy; they took one full month to install C++ programming in all the systems, and finally we did that by ourselves, and we were warned for installing virus. None of the systems had anti-virus software installed. The reason was all hardware outdated (1980’s). FYI: All the lab assistants were only educated up to 5th standard, Non- English medium, whose past work experience were Driver, sweeper etc.., there was some exceptions.
“Facilities & infra structure”, The buildings were the blue print of very good architecture. You can see a banyan tree on top of all the building. Corridors with “Dog Shit”, sorry for that word, but it was true. Rest rooms were worse than a public toilet. You may wonder “what those sweepers and maintenance staffs were doing?” yes they were seriously discussing about television serials and movies. We, students, had to request them to do their job, they demanded money from us.
We moved to second year. Second year (department) staffs were equally competitive and proved that they were far superior to them. We had one staff who never visited the class and many of us never knew he existed. Subjects got more technical and we could not help ourselves. Private college guys gave us their notes and helped us. We started to drop confidence in ourselves. One of our friends had got arrear in OOPs lab; it was the first time he failed in his entire life. It continued.
For each and every positive initiative from our side, we got a totally unethical and rude reply from the staff members. Ok, you may ask “What were those HODs and Principal doing?” Mostly all the HODs were absent minded, all the time they were searching for their cell phone, keys, some important paper, and above all they were very health conscious, they never took any class for more than 30 minutes and mostly avoids it, they work for only half day. Principal, in one word "puppet or rubber stamp”. Every year there was a riot break out between students and local rogues, once they left a guy with a head injury, the college did not take action against the rogues. Those injured guys were suspended. FYI: This was happening every year, and was told it had been happening all the years.
We successfully went to third year and realized that both our technical and soft skills were zero Again FYI: There was no dress code, one lecturer used to come in casuals like tracks, mostly staffs prefer to take classes in local language, Seniors helped us to prepare for written test, conducted mock interview etc… The sad part was none of the lectures wanted a student to be placed. The root cause for the problem was almost all the lecturers in our college were the worst performers in their academics and got the job through politicians.
Placement Cell did their best to make sure all the students got placed in a company. MNCs that came for conducting campus recruitment were cheated with false data. Many students didn’t even know in which company he got placed. There were many proxies for attending interviews and they used all the means to make sure all were placed. First we didn’t realize the benefits for them in doing that. Later we came to know the fact that they collect Rs 1000/- from each student. FYI: This College has no part in calling the Companies for campus recruitment and the recruitment expenses were taken care by the company. They cook up some account bills and continued it as a routine work. All the moving parts (staffs) were greased. Many Companies came to know about this and stopped their recruitment activity and withdrawn its offers when it came to know about the malpractice that happened.
Finally we moved to final year. Our guide was good. But, there were students who literally went to the guides house and took tuition for their kids. One guide went a way ahead and asked his student to buy cinema tickets. We never had classes in final year.
The facilities were so poor to do the project. At one point of we decided to outsource the project and paid around 10k . Project review members never worried about the concept and criticized all the projects. In our case, guide helped us to publish a paper and the review staff members couldn’t open their mouth.
Academics/Office department, when you enter there you could find at least 3 to 4 heads sleeping on desk, some were busy reading kumutham, vigaden, etc.. The best part was the phone ringing. Many of them dont know what they are. I had one experience of getting the certificates from the certificates department. It took almost 2 months to get back my 12th mark sheet; it almost looked like a waste paper. There was hassle all the time when we went to pay the term fee.
Discipline. We had drinks party in hostel and we watched adult movies in hostel. What else, all the stuff that you want was available inside the college. A guy got killied in hit and run case, and they still searching the suspect.
Girls please be careful with the so called lectures. In our class we had a case of a girl who was ill-treated by a male lecturer.
I wrote this for students like me and my friends, who had dreams in life, and really wanted them to come true. Please avoid this college “Pondicherry Engineering College”. If you want to spoil your life in all possible way please do join this college.