Priya Prabhakaran's Review On College Of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram

Common Kerala Entrance Examination, my rank was 3100 and I also qualified in the Aptitude exam for Architecture. Chose the college because it is the most prestigious government college in Kerala in engineering, has excellent faulty and facilities.

It is a well structured course with proper focus on the fundamentals of architecture and on the various aspects related to architecture without limiting to just designing. We had course on history, building materials and construction, acoustics, climatology, interior designing, general drawing, conservation to get an overall understanding of the course.

No, it did not provide internship at the time. Today they are inviting more and more passed out students to come and join as temporary teaching faculty. I do not have a clue about the stipend offered but I am assuming it should be close to 20k.

Architecture students do not have placements but every other engineering course had placements. Some of the top most companies come every year to the college and number of placements are huge. Offers used to range from 2 lakh back then which must have definitely gone up now.

Cheapest fee structure one can imagine. We were given stationary supplies such as butter paper and design sheets on a regular basis and our fees came to just 2500 per year. Exam fees too was nominal. For the semester based courses the fee usually came to 1800 per semester.

Campus life was a fun filled one with a good balance between academics, sports, festivals, arts and politics. People from diverse backgrounds, states, languages, social strata studied and co-existed in harmony. There was no gender bias and the girls had as much freedom and fun as the boys.

Hostel was excellent and mess food shifted between average and good. There was variety though. Rooms were on a sharing basis with 3-4 people in each based on the size of the room. Rent and mess bill came upto 1500 every month. There were a lot of wings and each corridor had a proper distribution of facilities such as bathrooms and washbasins to meet the population.

Alumni could be stronger. There is not a reach out program other than a facebook page to join. I think people have lost touch over the years.

We had internals for our assignments, which was every other week and sessional exams every quarter and finally the year end exam. Yes, the written, model and drawing assignments would often overlap and resulted in several sleepless nights. In a way it trains you for the corporate world out there, whether its healthy or not is debatable.

There were some excellent professors who went an extra mile to educate and guide us. Like any other government college we also had our share of the not so good professors who gave us a tough time with internal scores. Internals play a large part in our annual result calculations amounting to 70% of the total. So it was make or break for us.