My daughter’s college decisions are coming out and she is turning 18.
The process has taken me back to that tender age for me when college admissions were so consequential that its hard for me to put it in words.
I cannot help but contrast how at ease my daughter is compared to how I was at that age. For me, it was nearly make it or break it, for her, she is confident that she will be able to carve out a good path for herself no matter the outcome. I like how she is but I am also proud of how I was.
I am a product of my times and my financial background. For me, getting into a good engineering school was highly consequential. That meant a certain path forward, without financial woes and concerns. I was heavily supported financially by institutional merit and means aid. This is the reason that I don’t forget to give back to the academic institutions that made me who I am.
My entire post-secondary education has been funded by public institutions.
I appeared for only three competitive entrance exams for my undergraduate education- IIT JEE (Indian Institute of Technology- Joint Entrance Exams), AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination) and DCE (Delhi College of Engineering). There are dozens of other exams that I did not participate in. I was certainly confident of my academic abilities that I opted out of all state exams.
From what I can gather now, roughly 200,000 students appeared for the IIT JEE Screening test and some of those were chosen for the Advanced stage (I think it was called mains back then). I received a 3 digit rank in the mains test that put me at higher than 99.5 percentile, ensuring a seat at the #1 ranked IIT- Madras (I think it was #3 back then) in the Mechanical Engineering department. I needed to be higher than 99.8 percentile to be able to attend Electrical Engineering. This is how brutal these selections are. You need to be top 0.2% in the country to study Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras and I could only manage being top 0.5%. And you need to be in top 1% to attend IIT Madras at all.
However, as they say, you never give up. There was another alternative. You compete with these top 1% kids of the country after you get in and then move up to Electrical Engineering. There were roughly 500 undergraduates at IIT Madras in our 2002 batch and 21 of us were able to move to the so called higher branches after the results of the 1st semester. Basically, the top 4%-5% of the the top 1%, breaking into the top 0.04%-0.05% territory. A child becomes a rank and GPA machine in a race like this. But it feels so consequential at that time that you don’t even wince once when putting in the effort.
And then there was the matter of financing the education. IIT education was heavily subsidized compared to higher education in non-governmental institutes. The tuition was INR 13,500 per semester, totaling INR 19,185 or so including health insurance and other mandatory fees (there are 8 semesters in the program). I was one of the 50 lucky students in my batch to receive the Merit-cum-Means scholarship that covered everything except food and personal expenses. With my parents’ help, I had already secured an educational loan but I did not need it for my tuition at all because IIT covered it all. My parents sent me a modest monthly stipend for food and personal expenses and that is all I needed from them to cover my entire undergraduate education. I used to be hesitant back then calling myself a scholarship student, afraid to be labeled as poor (we weren’t poor, we were just short of cash) but now I wear it as a badge of honor. It’s funny how perspectives change!
I should add the AIEEE and DCE story here for completeness. I secured an All India Rank (AIR) of 759 in AIEEE with a state rank of 32 for the state of Jharkhand. Same story, about 200,000 appeared for that exam as well, putting me in the top 0.4% category. At the Delhi College of Engineering Entrance Exam, I secured an AIR of 112. Of course, if you have done well enough at IIT-JEE, these exams don’t matter as much.
After I finished my B. Tech in Electrical Engineering, I applied for PhD in Electrical Engineering at 5 schools in the US and for an MS+MBA program in Germany.
I was risk-averse financially even at that stage of my life. I chose 5 schools that were doing good work in my area of interest in every decile of US News Ranking. I picked all the schools in the mid-west because I needed funding from school for both tuition and living expenses and I knew that the coasts were expensive, so no UC Berkeley or MIT or Stanford applications for me. I kept myself limited to 5 schools in the US for cost reasons because even the cost of applications and shipping the material mattered to me. In top 10, I applied to UIUC. In 2nd decile, UW Madison. In 3rd decile, University of Minnesota. In 4th decile, University of Notre Dame and in the 5th decile, Iowa State University. For my German application, I applied to the MS+MBA program to NIT+TUHH combined program.
I got into all 6. I was pleasantly surprised. The most generous funding was from University of Wisconsin-Madison, a four year funding promise totaling over $209,000. I am so glad I picked UW Madison Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. I received an excellent education and was able to make a good career for myself in Silicon Valley. I did not end up doing a PhD though and got a Masters instead. Today, I serve on the Advisory Board of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UW Madison.
I also received funding from all other schools, except University of Minnesota (I used to think Minnesotans were nice, just kidding, they are great).
And so continued the journey of a financially humble student, funded by public universities his entire post-secondary education, very light weight on his parents.
Now, the tables have turned. My daughter will not qualify for any means based financial aid. While my graduate school aid was fully merit based, my IIT aid was merit cum means. She has a harder problem. She needs to prove merit for any aid and she has been doing it consistently. Two good schools have already heaped generous merit scholarships on her. And the results from more schools are yet to come.
But she is not as nervous as I used to be. I still remember myself at 18, sitting in the Gymkhana Scholarship office at IIT, half ashamed, in front of the interview committee, justifying why my family cannot afford to pay tuition without education loans or the scholarship. Those moments have shaped who I have become. I have no complaints. I am proud of what my parents were able to do for me and its my turn to pass the torch forward.
Vishal Kirti 