With the colleges reopening in the city and engineering colleges preparing for admissions, Hyderabad will soon open its doors for students from all over the country. As the hostels buzz with new students, we look at the various traditions in colleges to welcome freshers.
At IIIT-H, there’s a student apex body that plans events every year for the freshers. “There is the usual first day campus orientation trip, where we show them the campus. The apex body (which comprises 15 members) selects around 80 students who act as mentors, who have three to four students under them. Then we have many events like sports activities or cultural activities. Last year, we had even organised karaoke nights. So the events are basically ones where they can have fun,” says Abhineet Jain, a member of the apex body.
But apart from that, they have a get-together called “Informals”. “For the Informals, we usually get together at the basketball court for senior-junior interactions. There, the juniors are allowed to perform. In the hostels too, the juniors live in different wings of the hostel, but we call them to the ground floor for interactions,” he says.
When it comes to hostel traditions, Bits-Pilani, Hyderabad, too has a story to share. “All the first-years stay in one hostel but when they move to the second-year they have to shift out. So, basically every senior goes to their old room when the first-years come in. They have friendly interactions where they share their memories of the room and more,” says Vishnu Saran, a fourth-year student.
Another ice-breaker for their colleges is the election campaign for the student office-bearers. “In the first month itself, there are a lot of activities, the most important one being the month-long election campaign. Seniors go over to the hostels for campaigns. We also tell them about the different clubs in the colleges and they are usually excited to join the clubs. For the first two weeks, the seniors encourage the juniors who are from Hyderabad not to go back home during the weekends and instead stay back in the hostel for a lot of fun activities,” says Vishnu.
At Bits, the juniors can also approach seniors to know more about teachers and how to make their own timetables. Students at many other colleges agree that it’s by helping them out with college work, that they actually break the ice.
Haya Arif, a fifth-year student at Nalsar says, “We have a mentor programme where the seniors are actually like tutors for the first-years. Even the hostels are accessible for the juniors and they can walk in any time for any kind of help they need. We have one mess so a lot of interactions happen there too.”
