Computer Science, Electrical Engineering - A Top Choice Among IITians

The first round admissions for IITs and NITs were conducted yesterday during the first ever joint seat allocation process this year.

Computer science and engineering is the most popular choice for many of the 25,000 students for the 10,006 IIT seats available.

For the 990 computer science seats across the 18 IITs, there were about 2.07 lakh applications making it an average of 209 contenders for every seat.

According to the data released by the Joint Seat Allocation Authority after the 1st round which shows electrical and mechanical engineering stand second and 3rd on the students' preferences list. Civil engineering being the 4th position.

Since this data was not made available prior to the admission process this year, the popularity of courses cannot be compared to previous years.

CSE and electrical engineering have been the top choices for at least a decade, say educationists.

A professor from IIT-Bombay, the organising institute for JEE (Advanced) this year, said CSE's popularity is purely due to the placement opportunities available.

"The best of the lot choose computer science, and they get picked for the best of the jobs. It's a circle. If good students start choosing other courses, the placement opportunities may get better there too."

According to the Times of India, if absolute numbers are taken into account, more students applied for mechanical engineering (2.06 lakh), but since there are 1,172 seats available, each had 176 candidates vying for it.

On the contrary, fewer applications were received for electrical engineering (1.97 lakh), but with 1,082 seats, the number of students vying for each of these seat was 182, making it the second best choice with students.

There are 970 seats available in civil engineering and 153 students applied for each of them, taking it to the list of top four student choices.

Mechanical engineering is an evergreen choice. While other trends keep changing, the job opportunities in mechanical engineering remain. Civil engineering, professors claim, could be an emerging trend as there are a lot of infrastructure projects coming up.