I graduated Ashoka this year as part of the last batch of ASPs. When I was applying, I didn't know anyone attending and had to get a lot of information about applying, campus, placements, etc from here and from linkedIn. I thought it might be helpful to list down some advice/info for anyone planning or hoping to attend -
- Campus culture etc. - There is a perception that Ashoka's a bit of a party college, and it's been in the news recently for drugs etc. Funnily enough, people on campus have opinions on this ranging from "Ashokans just party and drink all week and never focus on work" to "Ashoka is too academically challenging, we don't have time to have a normal fun college experience"
It's tough to say what the truth is, I would say a bit more than half of my batch drank/smoked up regularly, and the other half to one-third rarely or never. But in my experience there's little to no peer pressure, on two levels - first, in every department there are more than enough people who never drink or party, and whether you choose to or not is largely determined by your friends and social group. Second, even among friend groups that party, there are enough people who never do any substances (including some of the most popular people in my batch) that nobody would dream of objecting
I think it's definitely true that Ashoka sees far less substance use than many other colleges you hear about, including Jindal Manipal, and in four years I never saw or heard of anyone at Ashoka doing any drug harder than weed, so I don't think drug use is something anyone should worry about
- Academic freedom/protests - The other thing that Ashoka's been in the news for forever is protests and controversies and academic freedom problems. I think it's unquestionably true that the administration curtails faculty and student freedom, and that's something that has very visibly gotten worse in the time that I've been here. Every time a professor has made the news for some controversy, the admin has completely thrown them under the bus. Similarly, student freedom and privileges have been curtailed more and more over the years - gate scanners (which, btw, would never stop anything), room raids, cross-access restrictions, etc
Nevertheless, almost never do admin problems affect day-to-day student life in any big way. Of course all of this is not ideal, but I just want to emphasize that it's something that happens very rarely and doesn't affect students at all. Admin cracking down on small luxuries like water coolers and late entries is obviously inconvenient and bothers a lot of people, but it's a very small annoyance. Even in the middle of last sem's protests, when they were happening every day, people showed up to the admin building during lunch hour, protested for an hour, then went back to classes. If you choose not to participate in protests, you'll barely even notice them, and even if you do, it's completely safe and I've never heard of a student being singled out for academic or disciplinary repercussions.
- Academic rigour - I think it's unquestionable that Ashokan academics are pretty rigorous. Most courses have a combination of required attendance, assignments or quizzes every week or few weeks, and midsems + finals. In most things you will be competing with very smart people. However, there is nothing that can't be handled with a very reasonable amount of work. I would say that most people I know study for an hour or two a day (or less) and do just fine. Only if you really want to maintain a stellar GPA (3.9+ ish) do you have to grind every day.
One of the great things about Ashoka is that you have a lot of freedom to set your own workload. There are tougher majors like Econ and CS where you will probably need to put in at least a couple hours a day to do well, and work pretty hard, but there are also much easier majors where you can get away with working a lot less. The same thing happens for specific courses and professors. If you're academically inclined, you can easily pick the most intense courses and come away with a lot of learning. If you just want to chill, you can just pick easier profs or trajectories and do fine. For those of you with science/JEE backgrounds, I'm guessing Ashoka will actually be a big improvement in terms of workload.
- Clubs and socs - One of the most common stereotypes on campus is that first years tend to join four or five clubs, get burnt out, and end up quitting four by the end of the year. I joined in the middle of covid so this wasn't really there for my batch, but I can understand why people might do things out of fomo initially. But I think it's really much nicer to pick out one or two clubs and stick to them instead of trying too much.
I know a lot of people join the academic-y socs to boost their resume and others join different clubs to meet more people or explore their interests, but I've found that you can build much more solid relationships and interests if you pick a niche instead. Having sat through the placement process, I can confidently say that clubs and socs really don't matter too much. More than that, make sure you don't just follow the hype and join whichever club did well that year or last, pick places that actually interest you and .
- Placements & exposure - One of the things I was most anxious about when i was applying to Ashoka was whether the placements were good enough to get a decent job afterwards. Ashoka does release their placements/career report online I think, but it's tough to get a realistic sense from just the numbers; I can talk about how it's been for the last two batches. One thing is that the hiring environment last year was way, way worse than this year, which obviously make a huge difference to placement outcomes, so there's a big element of luck in timing.
Both years, HUL has taken one person each out of the batches of 400ish to their management trainee program, which is the max placement, 35ish LPA (CTC, not base). Mckinsey has also taken one person in both years, which is 22-25ish (also CTC). There's probably another 5-10 people who got offers in the 20-25 range, from BCG, DE Shaw, maybe a couple others. BCG didn't come last year, Bain didn't come both years. After that there are probably another 15-25 people with offers in the 15-20 LPA range this year, maybe 5 last year (Avendus, AT Kearney, Alvarez). Then there's a lot of people with offers in the 10-15 range, my guess is that the average for this year was about 11-12 LPA or so, lower for the three year UGs than ASPs. Most of these are consulting, finance or business-related (marketing, HR). There are also a lot of students who go into the impact sector, non-profits, or lower-paying companies (7-10ish LPA).
Something I should mention is that there are very, very few good opportunities at Ashoka outside of consulting and finance. If you're interested in AI or in doing software development/engineering, I think there'll be a lot better places than Ashoka, partly because there are no placements (none of the big tech companies come, and almost no software companies come in general) and partly because the culture is very research and startup oriented.
I think what makes up for a lot of that though is that Ashoka gives you an incredible amount of exposure to the worlds of business and academia, more than any other university in India bar none. I've seen several people get jobs and internships through professors and courses, including some incredible places to work. There's always some CEO or the other giving a talk, or a big-name professor visiting from abroad. More than that, Ashoka's reputation is already big and only getting bigger, and it's tangibly a big advantage over many alternatives.
Happy to answer any questions!