Campus Story - IIT Gandhinagar

Culture for a place, institution or organization is often defined as the way people behave in that place and is governed by the beliefs and values that people hold dear. Culture is very abstract, and it often takes years of conscious grind and random happenings to create the requisite culture and many a time this abstract “Culture” becomes the most critical factor that determines if the organization will succeed or not. Many organizations spend a lot of critical time in creating a culture that nurtures performance, the first step to build such a culture is recruitment.  

At Addverb we believe in making an organization of the future and in order to keep us young and energetic, we have been extensively recruiting from engineering campuses across the country in search of passionate technocrats and in this process we have created a plethora of stories and countless anecdotes around our campus drives. But one experience that has influenced me lately has been our campus recruitment drive at IIT Gandhinagar. While going at the newer IITs, I have always been perplexed by the notion of running these IITs at temporary campuses or a one building campus. It seems that these IITs were established in haste and many of them even after a decade of existence do not have a place that they can call home. Lack of a residential facility deprives the students of precious interactions, peer learning, an opportunity to develop close bonds with fellow batchmates and well-rounded development. It also hinders the development of a unique culture of the place. This clearly reflects when we speak to the students during our recruitment process.

When our team entered IIT-Gandhinagar situated on the bank of river Sabarmati, we were simply amazed by the planning with which the campus had been established (It is the first educational campus in India to receive 5 star GRIHA rating for sustainable and eco-friendly design), not only the infrastructure but we could sense that there was something different about this institute, yes this place had a very unique culture. The beautiful campus lured us out of our tired traveling schedule, and we took a stroll around the campus late in the night. Based on our experience so far, we expected a very silent walkthrough but were pleasantly surprised to see a very vibrant campus at 1 in the night. “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy”, we could see students playing badminton, Table Tennis, Snooker…….and just beside this were a group of students who were planning actively for some upcoming festival. Conversations among students filled every nuke and corner of the campus and I remembered what my L&D team in my past organization used to say, “Conversations are important as they provide the breeding ground for innovation”. Just spending some time at any of the late eateries at this campus, you could sense the energy of this place. It made us all excited for the process the next day, many a time these recruitment processes become too mechanical, but we were eager to meet the students from this campus.

We started with our process the next day and tried to interview as many students as we could. We were pleasantly surprised when we got to know that engineering students had subjects like Introduction to Philosophy, Economics, World History & Civilization, Design & Innovation, etc. I remember when we completed our masters in HRM from TISS, we had a foundation course, which comprised of Sociology, Economics, India’s Developmental History, Democracy, Caste & Society. Though we couldn’t appreciate these subjects much back then, but they did provide us a unique perspective and gave us a base on which we could develop our holistic views and could also understand the present dynamics of society. I could sense something similar at IIT Gandhinagar. Also, during our interactions, we realized a lot of emphasis was given on individual freedom of choice and this had resulted in students getting a lot of diverse experience in terms of both academic and co-curricular work done during their time spent on the campus. We met many students who had a bent of research and had worked hard on their ideas and projects and were very fluent and comfortable in discussing their projects and coursework. As we had anticipated, we really enjoyed interacting with the students and were amazed at the kind of projects and work they were doing and the kind of cross-domain interactions that they were having. Once the process was over, we again wanted to explore the campus and saw students practicing basketball and volleyball extensively, while visiting the canteen for dinner we could feel the passion and energy of the place. As the day progressed the campus became more and more vibrant.

For any institution it is very important to have a vision and more critical is to act as per your vision, we certainly felt that IIT Gandhinagar is keen to create a niche for itself by merging technology and humanities and are taking right steps in that direction. They have created a culture where students are given ample freedom to learn by discovery rather than by prescription and a great infrastructure, which is a hygiene factor, helps them to have a place which they can call home and develop a sense of belongingness and pride.