The official student media body of IIT Madras
“For those of you who are applying to study abroad, the deadlines are drawing near and you might be struggling to juggle courses, exams, apps and perhaps placements too. Here is a handy checklist you can use to make sure you’re on track.”
On 23rd February, Prof. MS Ananth, our former director, gave a lecture titled ‘The Importance of Humanities in Engineering Education’. As a Humanities and Social…
Craveyard Café in a crunch: walking distance from insti, a warm and quirky ambience, lovely food, board games, and 30% discount for insti students. Still…
In this edition of Made in Insti, T5E’s series on startups by insti students and alumni, Isha tells us all about AmrutDhara, which seeks to provide an alternative to expensive, wasteful bottled water by offering affordable, unpackaged and quality-assured potable water.
From IITM Memes to Shaastra to the T5E page itself – there are tons of insti-based Facebook pages of all kinds lying out there waiting to be discovered. If you are an Internet addict, you’ll find yourself familiar with most of them. In this piece, Isha tries to highlight the more interesting pages, the ones you might want to like and share and, of course, stalk.
Pizza Mutiny is a brand that many insti students are familiar with, by virtue of their notebooks that are, apart from being very reasonably priced, also popular for the sets of free coupons and the ‘bunk meters’ that come along with them. “It felt great every time a student thanked us because he just got an extra Papa Johns Pizza because of our coupons,” AP says. The ‘bunk meter’ and timetable, although simple additions, seemed to be “things everyone actually found useful”.
When asked about the inspiration behind Bloodline, Siddharth says, “We were faced with the desperate need to find blood donors at the critical hour. Many of us had faced it at different points of time. One of our team members, Sheeba, had to find blood for a relative for an operation. Ashwin, another of my team members, had to go through the same process for his grandmother’s cancer treatment. We got together and wondered, why is it that in this world of fast internet and social connectivity, we can’t reach out to people? If we can share photos and videos that can be viewed by thousands of people in a few minutes, why can’t we do the same for a critical need?”
One of the selling points of a solution like Tangle is its simplicity – they are so easy to make that it is possible to make one at home. Arun tells us how they went about shaping their initial idea. “We spent a month running through a number of iterations to come up with the perfect dimensions and placement of holes that would make a Tangle usable by 90% of all available earphones. Also, since Tangle is as small as a credit card, you can fit it into a wallet when you’re not using it.”
Isha Bhallamudi writes about her experiences with the wild side of campus.
Wildlife in insti. How do I begin? Well, I’m certainly not going to yammer about the wonderful biodiversity we have with all those hundreds of species, like the palm civets (which kept mysteriously popping up, dead, outside the Elec department), golden jackals (I don’t think anybody in insti has seen them yet), gerbils, chitals and Indian Star tortoises, not to mention the insects and reptiles and birds. There have been enough lectures and books and signboards already.