BITS Pilani : The true meaning of education

"Eventually it takes integrity of character to build something bigger than all fortune. Character that is built in a sprawling campus tucked away from the distractions of city life. Where students of life read between lines and theorems to realize true responsibility as human beings, to wield knowledge and bring about no less than a revolution, which ever path they choose to tread in life"

-- That’s what BITS Pilani believes. (From a rare Outlook advertisement of BITS)

The success of a university should be measured by the options and avenues it provides to its students, for them to learn and assimilate knowledge beyond books and beyond classrooms. Imagination, arts, languages, media and sciences are as important to engineers as technology. BITS fully understands that and unlike today’s namesake universities (or even the ones with huge names) believes that a student should have all such pathways in life, should involve in extra-curricular activities, should learn more than what a traditional engineer would learn.

Apart from all possible courses for traditional engineering branches and Economics, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Biology, Pharmacy and Management that a student from any branch in BITS can take (upon fulfilling the pre-requisites), BITS boasts of courses all the way from Gandhian Philosophy to Current Affairs. From Film Appreciation to Advertising, Effective Public Speaking to Creative Writing in Mass Communication, the students have enormous number of choices. There are courses like Film and Video Production, New Media, Creative Multimedia, Music, Contemporary India, Journalism, Aesthetics, Entrepreneurship, Commerical Law, Psychology, Drama, American Literature, etc., which are open for all students. There are regular workshops on topics such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Soft Skills etc, which provide the type of outlook to students that is not available in any other Indian university. BITS also has Centers of Excellence like the Center for Desert Development (CDD), Center for Women Studies, Center for Rain Water Harvesting etc, which are first of their kind efforts in India for promoting research in the respective fields.  (For a comprehensive listing of courses:

http://discovery.bits-pilani.ac.in/courses/body_oncamp_coursedescriptions.html)

It’s not a surprise then that BITSians are found not only at the top technology spots, but are also eminent authors, movie directors, animators, politicians, IAS, Army, police officers. In short, they are found in all fields of life since BITS–Pilani provides them with an unparalleled comprehensive and versatile education.

Merit at BITS Pilani

As Camelpost once said:

BITS Pilani has ensured the creation of a classless, casteless society and thousands of BITS alumni take pride in identifying themselves as Indians and not belonging to any caste, religion or language.

Never ever did we see any discrimination towards or for a student@ BITS based on caste/language/religion and never will we see it too, for in India today we are the ONLY UNIVERSITY which does not entertain any quota; be it Management/NRI/SC/ST/OBC. The only admission criteria at BITS is Merit with equal rights to all, and it will always remain so.

MS/PhD admission statistics for BITS-Pilani, Pilani, Goa and Dubai Campuses, Fall 2008

Here are the admission statistics (for MS, MS/PhD and PhD) for all the three campuses of BITS for 2008.

BITS-Pilani, Goa Campus has done very well in its first ever admit scene ( The first batch of the Goa campus is passing out this year) with admits with full scholarships to universities like University of California – Berkeley, Harvard University, Stanford University, Purdue University etc. 

Average no. of admits per student stood at 3.27 (Total 454 admits for 139 students)

The list given below is NOT exhaustive.

Also,

Approx. 34% of applicants received some form of aid or the other (Fellowship, RA, TA, Tuition Waiver).

Top colleges like CMU (14 students), Stanford (11 students), Cornell (12 students), Purdue (29 students), Georgia Tech (16 students) etc. took a large number of BITSians this year.

These are the best (arguably!) admission statistics I've seen for any Indian University!

Kudos to BITS and BITSians!

MOUs with Foreign universities (Foreign collaborations of BITS)

Here is a list of reputed universities abroad, with whom BITS has collaborations with. The collaborations range from Exchange Programs (For both faculty and students) to joint research facilities. This is again not an exhaustive list and does NOT include Indian companies:

For more information go to: http://discovery.bits-pilani.ac.in/iru_site/mou.html

1. Advanced Business Language Group Inc, USA
2. Altera International Limited, Hong Kong
3. Arizona State University, USA
4. Ben Gurion University of Neger, Israel
5. Binghamton University (State University of New York), New York, USA
6. Braton Bitech Inc, Maryland, USA
7. Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute
8. Christian Medical College Hospital, Vellore and Tulane University, Louisiane, USA
9. Cornell University, Ithaca, USA
10. ETA Ascon, Dubai
11. Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland
12. Hogskolan I Boras(University College of Boras), Sweden
13. Iowa State University, Iowa, USA
14. Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA
15. Kathmandu University, Nepal
16. Lund University, Sweden
17. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA
18. Motorola Inc., USA
19. Nokia Research Centre, Finland
20. OSTN, Cleveland, UK
21. Purdue University, Indiana, USA
22. State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
23. Techlead Software Engg Pvt. Ltd, USA
24. The Commonwealth of Virginia George Mason University, USA
25. The George Washington University, USA
26. The Jacob Blaust Institutes for Desert Research of Ben Gurion University(BIDR-BGU), Israel
27. The Tun Hussein Onn National Eye Hospital, Malaysia
28. Transtech International Inc., Maryland, USA
29. Tulane University Medical Centre, New Orleans, USA
30. Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, Bethesda, USA
31. Universities Of Ontario, Canada
32. University of Colombo, Sri Lanka
33. University of Dundee, UK
34. University of Maryland, College Park, USA
35. University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
36. University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA
37. University of Southern Califonia, USA
38. University of Windsor, Canada
39. Utah State University, USA
40. Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
41. Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
42. York University, Canada