Life of a design student

My main focus was to get into NIFT. But to keep options, in case I wasn't able to clear NIFT, I had applied for IIAD and UID as well. I am in a general category so I didn't get any quota. To appear for B.des in NIFT, you must pass STD Xll, any stream. The maximum age to apply for this programme is 23. The entrance exam is taken in 3 parts; One day, you'll have CAT (Creative Aptitude Test) and GAT (General Aptitude Test). In CAT there are questions to judge your creativity, you'll have the drawing part here. This paper will be for 3 hours. In GAT you'll have basic Maths, Reasoning, English and General Knowledge. This paper will be for 2 hours. Once you get shortlisted, you'll have to appear in the situation test. You'll get materials here, and you'll have to make a 3D model according to the question, and a write up explaining it. Once you get the final result, you'll get your rank and then will appear for counselling where you can choose the course and campus according to the availability of seats.

I was interested in fashion design, but I wasn't getting it in the top 5 centres so I shifted to knitwear Design, both being similar courses. In college, we have one mentor for every 4-5 students. Not all faculties are great but some of them are really nice. And if you have any doubt or confusion, all of them are always ready to help you out. For the first two parts, we have to do the only submission of the given assignments. For the end term, we have a jury where teachers review and roast our work so get real life experience for when we work in the industry. There are too many submissions and mostly you'll get less time to sleep when the jury nears, but at the end of the day, it's worth it.

NIFT has centralised campus placement. We can sit for placement in our last year of college. NIFT placement percentage drastically reduced recently, but what you get completely depends on your quality of work. We'll probably get many options since NIFT is a prestigious institute, a large number of companies come there for recruitment. I don't have any plans yet, I'll probably get a job first and then think of how I want to go further.

NIFT is expensive considering it's a government college. But studying design is probably even more expensive if you go to private colleges. Apart from that, you'll have to spend a lot on stationary throughout the course. NIFT provides different scholarship schemes. You can apply for it if you are eligible and you can get even up to 100% scholarship for the particular year that you applied for.

The main cultural event at NIFT is "Spectrum" where apart from NIFT students, other students also come and participate. There are many different programmes accommodated in this 3 days fest and it's super fun. Apart from that, there are celebrations every now and then on different occasions. For books, we have a Resource Center where we can sit and work, read books, work on the available computers etc. We also have a Mac lab in a different building. There are different social clubs such as cultural club, literary club, sports club etc where we get to do extra activities.