RutSum

Counseling At Thapar University, Patiala

After getting a rank of 5499 in the AIEEE 2008, I was confident that I would get a seat at Thapar University, Patiala. The counseling for my rank was on 17th June, 2008, in the Thapar campus itself.

Because of the possibility of rains, we ditched the idea of driving to Patiala and chose to reach there a night before, by bus. Also, Patiala is a relatively less developed and small city, with limited options for stay. Due to the heavy rush of admission seekers at Thapar, it was expected that the few hotels that Patiala houses, would already be full/overloaded. Because of this, we decided to stay my Dad’s friend’s house, which is situated in Bahadurgarh, 15 Kms away from Patiala.

The counseling for my rank was to start at 10:00 a.m., so we started early at 9 to be on the safer side, and reached there by 9:40 a.m. We were told to sit in the waiting hall and look out for updates on the projection screen, which was displaying a dynamic HTML page which updated itself twice every second, in Internet Explorer.

As you can clearly see (in this not so clear photo) that the seats being allotted in each branch and each category were being subtracted from the total count in this table as soon as they were updated in the auditorium (where the counseling was taking place). When I arrived, about 6 seats of Computer Engineering, 1 from Electronics and Communication Engineering, and 1 from Mechanical Engineering had already been allotted (in the Outside Punjab category). The numbers kept on rolling, and the seats kept on decreasing. People with ranks that were too far off started to get up and walk away from the Waiting Hall.

Though our counseling time was to be 10:00 am, it started at 11:30 am, which means we had to wait for 1 and half hour in the waiting room, watching the dumb screen with ’seat status’. This was, however, nothing if compared to what guys with ranks from 7000 - 8000 had to face. They were called at 11 am, and on arrival were told that their counseling would be after lunch, i.e. 3:30 p.m.

When our counseling started at 11:30 am, we moved to the auditorium. We were asked to take our seats and fill up forms for payments through cash or demand draft. There were around 20 people from the Thapar staff on the stage, with laptops, printers, and other electronic equipment such as currency bill counters and fax machines. A guy on the podium started calling out roll number ranges, like 5000-5100, and people who had their roll numbers in this range were asked to come to the right side of the stage where there documents were verified.

After the document and AIEEE rank verification, we moved ahead in line to the person who was allocating various branches of engineering according to availability and the choices we had filled in our preference sheets, which we had submitted at the previous counter. When it came to my turn, I got quite nervous because only 4 seats in Computer Engineering were left. Dad, who was sitting in the auditorium was keeping a close eye on the number of seats left (which was being displayed constantly on a screen inside the auditorium) and kept updating me by raising the appropriate number of fingers.

So I got the 4th last seat (out of 40) in Computer Engineering. After getting a confirmatory slip, I had to proceed to the next table where they took a photograph of me and then printed an admission letter which was a confirmation of my admission. After getting this letter we paid the fees through a DD at the payment table, and got a receipt for it. The amount for the DD was Rs. 92,420 (including hostel fees) and Rs. 3500 for Mess (Caution Money + Amenities Fund), which adds up to a total of Rs. 95,920.

We can withdraw admission from Thapar before 17th July, 2008. In that case, they will keep Rs. 1500 and return the balance (Rs. 94420) to us. Considering the CEE rank that I have secured (644), I am giving NSIT/DCE a higher preference than Thapar. The main problem is the date of counseling for CEE - 22nd July, 2008, which is 5 days after the last date of withdrawal of money from Thapar. Lets see if I can come up with a solution.

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