Lateral Entry

Paving a new road to the green campus, the institute initiated the Lateral Entry procedure for admissions into the Dual Degree Courses for ECE and CSE streams last year. As their first academic year in IIIT-H comes to an end, we ask our lateral entry students how their experience has been so far. What problems have they been facing?

Academically, they complain about not being able to cover important prerequisites for some courses. Instead, they are bound to take up courses like Science-I, Engineering Systems, etc. despite having done them before. A suggested measure was to focus on new subjects rather than repeating already covered non-core courses, and giving them choice and flexibility in taking up prerequisites, like opting for courses like C Programming, Data Structures, DLP, etc., seeing as they’ve joined a college whose students are best known for their programming skills. Moreover, there is still ambiguity and lack of clarity regarding the actual number of credits to be transferred from their previous academia.

Another common complaint we hear from the students admitted through Lateral Entry is the allocation of hostel rooms away from their ‘supposed’ batch-mates in UG2. They were isolated from other batches and lived with the first years who were equally new to the campus. This led to a lack of interaction with classmates and frequent miscommunications with seniors. Admitted as Dual Degree students, lateral students are supposed to take up labs as per their interests by the end of their first academic year in the college. Their lack of interaction with seniors proved to be an marked disadvantage in this regard. This issue was raised on several occasions and demands a proper response.

Lastly, repeating a year is not an easy decision to make. Some form of regular guidance and counseling for these students, for the tasks that lay ahead, could have been provided both by the faculty and other students.

However, amidst all this people did appreciate the administration for having kept their nerve while tackling all sorts of unusual issues surrounding the Lateral Entry students.

Ping! is happy to bring forth these issues which, when scrutinized in a proper and open discussion, should create a welcoming environment that would eventually correct the flaws and pitfalls observed by the Lateral Entry students and help them adjust well to their new campus.