A few days back, I was having a discussion with my colleagues. There are four of us who occupy a cubicle. All four of us are Engineers (after all we work in a Telecom company) and we were talking about alternate careers and what we could have done with our lives instead. Needless to say, I said that I would have been a writer. A colleague of mine said that he would love to be the producer of a travel show. We started talking about how all of us just did engineering. I was reminded of this quote then..
India is where people do Engineering first…
…and then decide what to become in Life!
When I quoted it, one of them said that more than a decade and a half back, when it was time for us to choose our professional courses, we had very limited options available. Career counselling was done on the basis of your marks and a few basic aptitude tests. It was the pre Internet days and so as students, we had no place to go and check what courses are available at what colleges and what are the entrance tests needed for that. Fast forward to today where anything and everything is available on the world wide web. Today, we have an information overload and it would be enough to make a teenager’s head swim! There is a clear need to have portals dedicated to college education that cover a wide range of options and help students choose. CollegeDunia does exactly that!
College Dunia is a listing portal, with information of more than 20,000 colleges in India. It is a platform for students to find information about various institutions and be informed of all aspects of it, including college festivals!! The site is very well created allowing you to search, browse courses, write reviews of colleges, browse exams, and even get placement information. Look at the bee-hive of fields above. It covers the gamut from art to vocational courses, from law to paramedical. Each institute’s rating is displayed along course names, seats and fee. There are a lot of filter options by streams, location, fee, entrance exams, duration and even whether it gives you a degree or a diploma. Once you have filtered several related searches open up. For example, if you choose Karnataka as the state, you get a city option where you can choose to filter Bangalore. Once you have shortlisted a few colleges, you can download the e-brochures, saving you a trip to that college. I remember those long rides in the monsoon visiting colleges to buy the brochures in my time! All through the browsing, the side bar keeps showing you a custom list of Top Colleges. Say if we take the example above, the very first option you see is Top Colleges in Bangalore. This is followed by top colleges in other cities. When you start filtering by stream, you start getting top colleges in that stream in the cities! Cool. Isn’t it?
College Dunia is founded by Sahil Chalana, who is a 2010 graduate from BITS Pilani. He noticed that notifications and announcements from colleges were quite scattered and students had to struggle to get in-depth information that was crucial to decision making. He realised that while you needed detailed fee structure, scholarships, cut offs, admission process details, eligibility and even co-curricular facilities to short list colleges, you also liked to know things like amenities, fests, hostels etc. These can be critical in choosing one over the other. In May 2014, he launched College Dunia to provide exactly this!
Day 14 – September Blogging Challenge