Low CGPAs in IITs do not make you an Underachiever

At IITs or other prestigious engineering institutes of India, low CGPAs means that your confidence plummets to an all-time low. You feel like you will never be able to achieve everything in life – an idea that gets re-enforced by your professors, batch mates, parents and society in general. But there are just too many exceptions to keep your hopes up.

Harish Sivaramakrishnan from BITS Pilani shares, “At 18, I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. I was offered Chemical Engineering at BITS and I took it up. With a low aptitude in Physics and allied Physics courses, I failed three subjects in the first semester. By the second semester, I started learning HTML and discovered my never-ending love for music and computers. Flunked several courses again. As I made reputation as a design hacker, I also turned out to be a course slacker. The end of the story is that I am an engineer today and worked as worldwide web and open standards evangelist at Adobe systems.

My band Agam was the first independent artists’ band to be the solo producer of Coke Studio at MTV Season 2 and the first-ever MTV Push artist at the MTV Video and Music Awards in India.”

Sachith Sriram Kothur offers a more realistic advice:

ï‚· Work hard to improve your CGPA, and

ï‚· Work hard on the reason why you got a low CGPA (for job interviews).

There can be several reasons why one ends up with a low CGPA. Students in IITs come from different states and diverse backgrounds. Often, students with better memorization skills do better than their peers in tests. For rare IITians who get the branch of their choice, achieving higher CGPAs become easier too. At times, communication skills pose a problem for students. Teacher bias cannot be ruled out too. In such a scenario, it is a blunder to equate low CGPAs with ‘stupidity’. If one is passionate about whatever they are doing, works smart and is not afraid of hard work, CGPAs cannot stop him or her from achieving ‘success’.

What do you think about low CGPAs at IITs? Write to us at blog@askIITians.com.