Post graduate students of prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology have come together to take the burden of guiding and grooming the next generation of researchers. It is for this reason that they have started a forum to guide aspirants of the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), the IIT/Indian Institute of Science entrance test for graduate students.
The aim was to reach out to students who are trying to prepare for GATE and who have doubts on the same topic. Called GATE Counsellor, the portal has separate forums for most departments and interdisciplinary research schools with student moderators who are from the field.
With time, GATE exam is becoming more and more popular among India students. This year 5.59 lakh candidates are taking the exam in compared to 4.14 lakh last year. It is because of this reason that this site is gaining popularity and gets more than 1,000 hits everyday.
A group of students from IIT-Kanpur came up with the concept last year but it was more generic and not many people visited it. This year, 1,800 students have registered on the website for counselling.
Speaking about this website to the media, VSK Murthy Balijepalli, moderator and in-charge, GATE Counsellor, from IIT-Bombay, says, GATE is a very complex process. After the results, various departments have their individual criteria for admissions and students also have so much to choose from.Hence, students taking the test have lots of doubts that need to get resolved.
Another objective of GATE Counsellor is to highlight research in India. They are trying to spread awareness that it is not only the foreign universities that are conducting research, many premier Indian institutes are also conducting cutting-edge research.
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