My KCET preparation and journey of BNMIT, Bangalore: Ashrith Ananthashayana

Ashrith Ananthashayana

Right from my childhood I have been a consistent performer as far as my academics is concerned. I scored a decent 91% in my 10^th board examination and I decided to pursue Science in Class 11. Since I belong to Bangalore where we have quite a lot of good Engineering colleges, I had no exclusive plans to take IIT-JEE or AIEEE (for NIT’s at that time). The placements in the top 10 Engineering colleges were decent and all I wanted was to get into one of them. So I decided to join one of the premier coaching institutes, BASE Education, for Class 12^th and KCET preparation. Well, this institution had got its reputation from the fact that Infosys Chairman emeritus Mr Narayan Murthy’s son Mr Rohan Murthy had joined it and fared well in the SAT examinations. Additionally, it was one such coaching institute people joined exclusively to crack JEE and AIPMT examinations.

The subjects taught at the center gave me a solid foundation in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. The lecturers at BASE were extremely good. The classes in my Pre-University college mainly served as a revision to the classes at BASE. Moreover BASE ensured that they only select the best brains for their course and the peer knowledge I had at BASE was good too. The huge amount of course material they gave us for these core subjects served as a great reference material for me during my preparation. Since I had made up my mind that I would be aiming one of the top colleges in Bangalore, I focused on KCET and decided not to take JEE and AIEEE. I scored decently in my 12^th Board examination. Having scored an overall percent of 91.17% and 94% in my core subjects, I was hoping to get into the top 3 Engineering colleges in the city, but my KCET didn’t go according to my wish as the Physics paper that year was unusually tough and i marked a few answers incorrectly. I secured a rank of 3115 out of 1 lakh applicants. Since Electronics was one of my core subjects in Class 12th and I had secured full marks in that subject, I wanted to pursue Electronics and Communications or Telecommunications as a stream in Engineering. Based on my rank, I had to take a decision whether to study Mechanical or Electrical Engineering in one of the top 3 colleges of the city or study Electronics/ Telecommunications in one of the top 5-10 ranked colleges. I decided upon the latter. I pursued Telecommunication Engineering at B N M Institute of Technology (BNMIT), Bangalore, which was ranked 7^th in the city at that point in time as I felt studying what I loved would be better that studying what I didn’t enjoy in a better engineering college.

BNMIT as a college is very good if one is pretty serious about academics which I was at that point in time. The college also offers decent placements. Located in a residential area in South Bangalore, it was not well known for its infrastructure and it did not have a sports ground back then. But it personally didn’t affect me much. The professors were pretty good and most of them were PhD holders. I fared well in the university examinations too and secured 3^rd rank in college during my 7^th semester examination. At the end of my Engineering I had secured an overall percentage of 81.5% and stood 15^th (overall) in the university in the Telecommunication specialization. Being methodical and consistent was the key for me to achieve decent scores during the examinations.

In addition to this, I was also part of the music team in my college and represented my college in two different university fests. Since I am a trained Tablist, I also participated in solo events. During my final year I participated in an event called Folk Orchestra, where I played four different musical instruments simultaneously. We won the silver medal in that event and our college stood 3^rd out of 150+ colleges which participated in the same.

Founding the college quiz club was another major accomplishment at BNMIT. My passion for quizzing made me represent my college in various quizzing competitions. Although we reached the finals of every competition, we won in a very few of them. But I observed a trend here, the colleges that used to win mostly had a well-established quiz club which our college lacked at that point in time. So my quizzing partner and I decided to take this forward and started our own quiz club ‘Q Quotient’. Now 5 years after Graduation, it gives me immense pleasure to see that the club we started with modest intentions to take quizzing to a higher level has reached much higher ground and BNMIT has started winning many competitions.

Finally, I must say that those four years were truly great at BNMIT and I would like to cherish the learnings I have had there for the rest of my life.

About the Author:

I am Ashrith Ananthashayana. I graduated in Telecommunication Engineering from B N M Institute of Technology, Bangalore in the year 2012 and am currently a student of S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Class of 2018. I have worked for Sankalp Semiconductors Pvt Ltd as a Design Engineer. I have also worked as an Architecture Validation Engineer at the client location (Broadcom Corp.).