Lack of Engineering Colleges in India is the single biggest reason why parents spend so much on IIT Coaching. Students who aspire to study engineering in India face a huge problem. There just aren’t enough good engineering colleges in India. This makes getting into good school artificially harder than it needs to be.

And, a large percentage of parents are pushing their children toward inexpensive Government Funded Training Institutes (GFTIs) for a rewarding career in engineering, because they aren’t aware of other possibilities.

One of the biggest drawbacks of our education system is that it’s not flexible. Colleges in the USA, Europe, Australia, and Canada allow students to take cross-disciplinary courses to explore their interests and build a degree that is tailor made for them or one that makes them more hireable.

For example: you can pursue a minor in music and a major in electrical and computer engineering like Anubhav, the author of this book, did during my Masters at the University of Texas at Austin. This made Anubhav an attractive candidate for companies working in audio and video and got him his first job.

Our colleges don’t offer a rich catalog of courses. All our electrical engineers do the same courses; a few elective courses in the final year are the only differentiators. Unlike most international universities, a majority of our engineering institutes don’t offer liberal arts courses or allow you to build much-in-demand graphic design or communication skills.

As a result, our engineers are not exposed to other disciplines and start their career with a narrow skillset even though most jobs for freshers require broad skills. For example, understanding how product design and software deployment works is a huge advantage for an engineer who is interviewing for their first job out of college.

So if you can make it to a top-notch international university for your undergraduate studies and opt for courses that align with your career aspirations, you will be able to prepare yourself much better for a successful global career.

What should IIT JEE aspirants do?

In this book, Anubhav encourages students to actively think beyond IIT. For far too long, we have been selling this myth that IITs are going to change your life forever. That is simply not true. Careers require constant maintenance and tuning. Instead of exhausting all your enthusiasm and energy on preparing for one exam, you need to become aware of the world of opportunities and your own interests. The payoff is much greater in the long run. And we all should be solving for the long run.

Further, IITs are not even the best engineering colleges in the world.

So many engineering colleges are better and easier to get into than IITs. Anubhav includes  startling statistics in the book.

Engineering is a base degree. You will need to top it up with specialisation, challenging assignments, new skills, lessons from failures and more. This is a journey that spans your entire career.

The better you are at stacking your base degree with skills, the more you multiply your career earnings. For some of you, your undergraduate years could even be a time when you discover that engineering is not where your heart is. If you are keyed into the world beyond your course, you will be able to make choices that will gear you up for success.

Credentials matter. If you find yourself studying in an average or obscure institution, stay positive and work hard to do exceedingly well so you can either get a good job or apply to reputed institutions and qualify. You will find that doors keep opening when you work hard and keep improving yourselfA