Mumbai: When Kartik Mehboobani struggled with his master’s dissertation at IIT-Roorkee, he said his guide told him he did not belong there. After being held back a year, he found a different professor who gave him a lighter project so that he could focus on finding a job. Same institute, two very different responses.Former and current IIT students told TOI that the help they received could depend on who was on the other side of the desk, within a culture of pressure that shapes students and faculty alike. Their accounts come as IIT-Bombay faces scrutiny over its handling of students under academic and disciplinary stress following the death of student Sahil Wakode.Mehboobani, who graduated in 2018 and is now a senior consultant in Pune, said master’s dissertation projects were allotted according to GPA rather than students’ interests. He said when he struggled with the fundamentals of his assigned topic, a professor objected to being given a “weak student”. Eventually, Mehboobani was left without a guide and had to repeat a year despite having no courses pending.He acknowledged, however, that not all professors were insensitive to students’ struggles. “I was lucky to find a sympathetic professor, who I could speak to about the pressure I was facing to find a job,” he said. The professor gave him a relatively simple project so that he could devote more time to his job search. “I wish there were more people like him in the system,” he added.Gokul Ramachandran, another 2018 IIT-Roorkee graduate, recalled telling a professor he was having sleep problems because of depression. “She suggested I run daily to tire myself out and that young people shouldn’t have such issues,” said the 31-year-old, now a senior product manager at a Bengaluru-based technology company. In his final year, he said, the dean suggested his mother come and live on campus to help him.There is also the adjustment of moving from being a high-performing school student to being one among hundreds of equally accomplished peers. Aditya, a senior software engineer at Meta who graduated from IIT-Kharagpur in 2019, said he felt “intense shame about not being ‘smart’ enough” when he ranked around the middle of his class. He later completed a master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.Aditya cautioned against placing the onus on faculty. “At the end of the day, it’s not the professor’s job to be your best friend or your therapist. They’re also not the ones creating the grades-obsessed culture. I don’t know if targeting a professor or a director can rectify the situation,” he said.The pressure inside IITs was inevitable, he said, given students’ drive for upward social mobility and the limited number of high-paying jobs that could help them and their families climb that ladder.An IIT professor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said students arrive carrying the pressure of years of intense competition, which worsens during examinations. Counselling services are available across IIT campuses. IIT-Bombay’s Student Wellness Centre offers individual counselling, group therapy, mindfulness workshops, peer support and other wellness programmes. The professor, however, said IITs needed to do more to address students’ psychological needs.Ramachandran said requests for assignment extensions, grace marks to cross a passing grade or leeway on attendance could make students feel they were asking for personal favours. “The professor would be seated and would make you stand and write a letter of apology, while they made sarcastic statements about how you were useless,” he said.An IIT-Bombay postgraduate student described trying to change PhD supervisors as particularly difficult. “Professors have all the power in the system; each issue is decided on a case-to-case basis,” the student said. Another student, they recalled, changed supervisors relatively easily because a professor backed them, “whereas I had to run from pillar to post, pleading at every turn”.Students from backgrounds less represented in the system face another set of challenges. A first-generation learner at IIT-Bombay, who grew up in a village and studied largely in a vernacular-medium school, said access had widened without a corresponding change in faculty backgrounds and assumptions. “However, IIT professors still largely come from privileged sections,” she said. TOI had reported last month that only 11% of IIT faculty were from reserved categories.However, the student did not want to paint professors as villains. The system, she said, overburdens faculty with research and consultancy work, leaving little time to understand students from diverse backgrounds or mentor them.
