IIT Mandi: Preparing students beyond engineering

The engineering institute is giving various types of exposures to students to look for career options beyond engineering and technical sector. 

Space Technology and Astronomy Cell (STAC) at IIT Mandi conducts various activities related to Astronomy and Space Science. The activities include star gazing, group discussions, expert talks, hackathons etc and AstraX, Utkarsh and Zenith are major annual events of the cell.

STAC is one of divisions created within the IIT Mandi to give students not just opportunity to learn things beyond their regular engineering course curriculum, as well as explore career opportunities in those fields.

Dr. Arnav Bhavsar, Advisor, Space Technology and Astronomy Club, and Associate Professor, School of Computing & Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi says STAC runs various science communication initiatives on its social media pages. The club is also actively working on computational astronomy projects. In past, club has published open source packages like EinsteinPy. Members are working on projects like SATLABS (Balloon Satellite), Star Tracker etc.

Recently, STAC received a globally competitive grant of € 4388 from the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Office of Astronomy for Development for a project: "Upliftment of Space Technology Cell in Himalayas".

AstraX hosted by the institute is an inter-college Astro-meet event, which features a panel of national and international speakers. STAC has received a grant from the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) for the project entitled ‘Upliftment of Space Technology and Astronomy Cell in the Himalayas.’ The STAC project was among the 21 projects selected from a total of 110 project proposals submitted from around the world in the year 2020. The grant of Euro 4388 is to be used for popularising astronomy-related activities in the Himalayas.

IIT Mandi- Providing students with skills and values

In addition to its unique academic curriculum, the engineering institute has multiple student societies encouraging students to take part in Community Outreach and Extracurricular Activities for holistic personality development

Campus life

Indian Institute of Technology Mandi has a remarkable campus in the serene Himalayan setup. With its state-of-the-art infrastructure spanning a built-up area of 2.16 lakh sq. mt. and comprising cutting-edge laboratories, libraries, sports facilities, and spaces for other extra and co-curricular activities, IIT Mandi provides a unique atmosphere to learn and grow in the lap of nature.

Student Gymkhana at IIT Mandi

Apart from academics, students of IIT Mandi get opportunities to participate in various co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, thereby ensuring a very strong all-round development of their personality. Many groups of like-minded students have formed various societies in order to pursue their interests. Institute's student gymkhana has a total of seven societies: Technical Society, Literary Society, Cultural Society, Research Society, Academic Society and Sports Society.

These societies are comprised of all the students clubs encouraging them to take part in community outreach and extracurricular activities for holistic personality development. Some of these clubs include:

Programming Club

The Programming Club of IIT Mandi is another society, especially for coders, to explore new possibilities in programming and to put their skills to test at the same time. It organises various coding competitions at national and international levels giving young programmers a wide exposure.

Three Students of IIT Mandi have won Gold medal in QuantInsti Algorithmic Trading; Silver in SaptangLabs Security Hackathon, and Bronze medal in Bridgei2i Automated Headline and Sentiment Generator, in the 2020 Inter IIT Tech Meet 9.0, organised virtually by IIT Guwahati.

Sharing his experience about the Programming Club, Rajat Bansal, student pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science Engineering, Batch of 2020-24, IIT Mandi, said, “Competitions organised by this club and mentorship by seniors have truly motivated me to put more effort in coding. The most recent event organised - Vision Arcadia - was very good, and through it I learned a lot about machine learning and enjoyed participating in it.”

Student’s Cultural Society

The Cultural Society of IIT Mandi organised an event called Adventure Time, which was the first online cryptography treasure hunt event of IIT Mandi. The event was organised on a web platform developed from scratch by IIT Mandi students which had a team formation feature, a question-answer mechanism and a live leaderboard of playing teams.

Apart from this, the Cultural Society also has clubs including Drama, Photography and Movie making, Dance, Music, Art Geeks and Designauts, to help them learn new activities and hone their skills.

“Drama club helped me to overcome stage fear. After joining this club I discovered my hidden talent and the different versions of myself”, said Smriti Srivastava, student pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science Engineering, Batch of 2019-23, IIT Mandi.

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Apart from co-curricular activities, IIT Mandi students also take part in community outreach activities.

The NSS unit of IIT Mandi is a voluntary group of students working for the betterment of the community. The overall objective of this scheme is to provide education and service to the community by the community.

In October 2021, Neha Grewal, secured All India Rank 2 in the Combined Defense Services (CDS) examination. She completed her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Mandi in 2018, which shows the options IIT Mandi students explore career options beyond the engineering sector.