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BITS came into being with the merger of Birla College of Arts, Birla College of Engineering and the Birla College of Science, Commerce and Engineering in 1964. In its early years BITS had collaborated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and it is by the virtue of this collaboration that BITS still retains that flavor of the American education system.

BITS Pilani, unlike other institutions, does not conduct an entrance examination but offers admission on the marks obtained in the 10+2 examination. The marks obtained are normalized and the merit list then created. "This does not put extra burden on the applicants to prepare for an entrance and it has worked well for us for the last 30 years," says Dr LK Maheshwari, director, BITS Pilani.

Practice School
Apart from the academic rigor, BITS Pilani places an unmatched emphasis on live projects. Every student has to spend two months after the second and the entire seventh or the eighth semester in an organization working on a live project. A faculty member is also deputed to guide and work on the project onsite. The list of companies or Practice Schools, as they are known as in campus lingo, is long and includes companies like Cognizant,, Honeywell, HP Labs, i-flex, Motorola, Intel, Sun and Wipro. "The projects are allocated to students on merit and other considerations that are specified from to time," says Prof. VS Rao, deputy director and dean (Practice School division).

Strong Industry Interface
Apart from the Practice Schools, the faculty and students of BITS Pilani work with the industry on a number of research projects of mutual importance. For instance, BITS houses the IBM Laboratory for Visual Programming Technologies as a wind of its Center for Software Development. The IPv6@BITS project received a lot of interest and acclaim, and made BITS the first connected IPv6 internetwork of India. BITS Pilani now has eleven international IPv6 tunnels running to Canada, Singapore, Korea and China.

The institute has also upgraded the facilities of its VLSI design lab. It also has the Cisco BITS Advanced Networking lab for research in the areas of VPN and video-on-demand.

Philosophical Matters
Barring the technology at BITS, everything else at the sprawling campus reflects the philosophy of the institute, which is to keep things functional and simple. Whether it is the furniture or the design of the campus. For instance the administration block built in 1948 is still big enough to allow smooth functioning of the institute even though it has grown five-fold since then.

The technology, however, is state-of-the-art, including BITS Connect, their network which was funded totally by BITS alumni. The institute ensures that the students get a hang of the latest. Students can opt for technology-specific certifications but only in the evening. BITSians therefore have no problem during placement time. Infosys alone picked up as many as 200 students from campus last year and the average salary for a BTech graduate was Rs 2.75 lakh per annum and while the highest went up to Rs 11 lakh per annum.

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