Academic And Administrative Holiday: Fill & Download for Free

Actually it doesn't matter much in which semester you start but academically and personally there are some benefits of enrolling in Fall. If you enroll in Fall1. You will have proper course sequence.2. There will be many students like you who enrolled with you, So you end up having good number of new friends.3. Summer can be used to do internships or for holidays.4. Most degree programs starts in fall, so all foundation courses are generally available in fall.5. In summer you will have fewer courses options.6. Taking help and administrative support at university may not be always available during summer.

LBSNAA is that place where every IAS aspirants dreams to go. Everyone wants to know what happens in LBSNAA and how the Officer trainees live their life there. So I wanted to share with you their daily life.A Day In LBSNAAOn a typical day an Officer Trainee (OT) is up by 6 am for morning exercise at the Polo Ground for 60 minutes. The riding schedule operates at the same time (and also at other times during the day as per batch size). The OTs thereafter have about an hour and half to get ready, have breakfast and report for classroom sessions, which typically commence at 9:30 am.There are 5-6 academic sessions of 55 minutes (length may vary from course to course) each on working days as per a pre-determined session plan. Curricular Inputs are given in various subjects of social, economic, political impotence like History, Political Science, Economics, Law, ICT, Public Administration and Management & Behavioural Science. Evening hours could be varied from time to time for extra-curricular module, sports, riding etc. Cultural performances and programmes are also scheduled occasionally in the evening before dinner. The OTs use the pre and post-dinner time to interact with each other and also to review the day’s learning and prepare for the sessions of the next day. Extra-curricular activities such as short treks, community services, adventure sports-rock climbing, para-gliding, river rafting etc. are also organized on holidays and weekends. A course usually demands 8-10 hours of activity per day, which totals to about 60 hours of academic and other engagements per week.Officers under training are encouraged to lead a rich, varied and vibrant campus life extending beyond the confines of lecture halls. At the Academy, outdoor events are an integral part of the dynamic training curriculum. The Happy Valley Sports Complex has been expanded to meet the growing physical training needs of the times. It has a state-of-the art gymnasium, badminton, squash, lawn tennis courts, cycles, football and hockey ground, to assist officers under training to improve their proficiency in sports and games. The Academy also has a full-fledged horse-riding infrastructure with instructors drawn from the best in the elite Army unit that is the President’s Body Guards.As part of the induction level training curriculum, Officer Trainees are sent on treks in and around Mussoorie and to the Greater Himalayas. They learn to cope with conditions of adversity, bad weather, insufficient accommodation and limited access to food. Visits and stay in backward villages help to understand and appreciate the realities of rural life. Officer Trainees are encouraged to take up extra-curricular modules and cultivate in-depth interest and proficiency in any hobby of choice.

When I was at Caltech the university did a survey of admitted applicants to answer this question. IIRC the yield numbers were similar back then, and administration was very concerned with boosting yield. (This answer applies only to undergraduate admissions, which I assume the OP is asking about.)One answer to the question is that Caltech did very poorly in head-to-head matchups with peer institutions. When applicants were accepted to both Caltech and at least one of MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, Caltech lost the applicant something like 80% of the time. It fared about evenly against schools like Columbia, UChicago, and UPenn, and for schools below that tier won out most of the time. And the rate of cross-admission was high; many students, particularly the strongest ones, applied and were admitted to at least one of these other high-caliber institutions. (I was part of that group.)So the superficial reason is that the applicant pools for Caltech and MIT are broadly overlapping, many applicants are cross-admits at both schools and at some of the Ivy Leagues, and that students mostly prefer one of those other schools versus Caltech. The deeper question is why Caltech loses out against schools like MIT and Stanford, while MIT holds its own. The best answer I have, from personal experience and meeting many cross-admits and alums, is that MIT has 1) a better brand, 2) a larger, broader student body and faculty, and 3) much better marketing to admits.The brand: MIT is broadly considered the premiere institution worldwide for math and engineering. A good way to gauge the brand is to look at TV shows with a brilliant scientist or eccentric genius character, and see how often they either attended MIT or are affiliated with the institution. By contrast, how often is Caltech mentioned? How often do your friends and relatives even know what Caltech is? I was admitted to Caltech before Big Bang Theory was on the air, and that show has done a lot to raise the name recognition of the school. But it’s also reinforced a perception that Caltech is a place not for smart people generally, but specifically for socially challenged nerds with narrow interests, so the net effect on the brand is pretty mixed.Many students applying to MIT and Caltech are convinced they want to study science and engineering in college, and when their friends and family tell them emphatically that MIT is the place to do this, they listen. This rationale is especially salient for applicants from east Asian and Indian backgrounds, where opinion among extended family has outsize importance and views about university rankings are more old-fashioned.The breadth: MIT is bigger than Caltech - much bigger. My recollection is that MIT has about 10k total students, split between 4k undergrads and 6k grad students. By contrast, Caltech has about 2k students, split about equally between 900 undergrads and 1100 grad students. As a result, MIT does many more things than Caltech - it has faculty working on a wider variety of projects in each field; it has fields like linguistics that Caltech doesn’t even touch; it has a large CS department with strong ties to companies like Dropbox; it has a business school, indeed one of the best bschools in the world; it has a larger number of specialized fabrication facilities and labs; and it generally provides more paths for students to pursue their particular interests.None of this is lost on applicants, who often come to view Caltech as more of a gamble for fitting their interests as they develop during college. This is doubly so given that Caltech has a (deserved) reputation for being not just being narrow, but also very theoretical. The school focuses mostly on pure science, with engineering treated as a distinct backwater culturally and pursuit of a PhD considered the best outcome of a successful college career.I was shocked to learn after graduating that at MIT doing a PhD post-college was not the norm, as it was at Caltech. My impression from the selection of MIT alumni I’ve met is that the modal MIT student wanted to be an engineer or an entrepreneur. (Clearly this is a biased sample since I lived in San Francisco for a while, but I heard similar opinions from alumni in other areas.) The long-term cultural trend in the United States seems to be toward these sort of applied engineering and tech-entrepreneurship pursuits and away from the study of science at an academic and theoretical level. This gives MIT a big advantage in attracting students, both over Caltech and other Ivy Leagues that devote fewer resources to these fields.Another big advantage of breadth is in offering a diverse student body that can support a variety of activities, clubs, and parties. It turns out that 900 undergraduates is too small to support a critical mass for most extracurriculars, especially when the student body is heavily selected for narrow math and science interests. This resulted in the pretty distinct impression that MIT students got into more trouble and had more fun than Caltech students, a factor weighing heavily in the minds of applicants.Finally, until recently Caltech had a huge gender ratio problem. The year I enrolled we had a record percentage of women in the class at - wait for it - a whopping 37%! This was considered outstanding and a real anomaly for the school, which at the time had an overall percentage of 33% women. By contrast, MIT consistently maintained a ratio of about 45% women. There was serious reason to fear for one’s dating life as a man going to Caltech, and this was borne out by many very sad and frustrated men I saw while I was there. The skewed ratio is also very discouraging to women, given the reputation of science as a hostile place for them. I’ve heard that Caltech’s gender ratio is now almost as good as MIT’s, but until very recently I think that deficit had a large negative impact on yield.The marketing: I was never impressed by Caltech’s ability to market the school to admits. MIT’s admissions team is a well-oiled machine, with big-budget production values, including posters and holiday cards to early admits and student bloggers who became celebrities to applicants; a grand fete of an admit day; and a collective voice which spoke confidently and authoritatively about the benefits of going to the school. Caltech’s efforts when I was there felt rinky-dink in comparison. To be honest, they came off like a small-town school pretending that it was in the same league as MIT. While usually a marketing team oversells a product, the Caltech admissions team in my time seriously undersold it.Part of the problem is probably economics - marketing is mostly fixed cost, and with 4–5x as many admits that fixed cost can be spread over more students, producing a far more polished product. But small elite firms can still market themselves very effectively, often simply by seeming exclusive and a bit mysterious to outsiders, and Caltech’s marketing didn’t feel like that.My guess is a big part of the problem was cultural. As a school with a purist life-of-the-mind culture, it’s easy to fall into a mentality that marketing is evil and the quality of the school’s work should stand on its own. It’s also easy to reason that students who really want to be there will know what they want, and anybody who needs to be marketed to wouldn’t do well at Caltech anyway. But this totally underestimates the power of marketing to teenagers who’ve never been individually targeted before in their lives. They’ve of course been exposed to plenty of consumer products ads, but those were never personal. They’d never watched an ad and felt like that product was really made for them, and that they were special for being offered it. So Caltech’s laissez-faire approach toward marketing to accepted students likely hurt yield relative to its competition, who all understood and fully exploited the benefits of good marketing.What about financial aid? This issue has evolved so rapidly that I can’t say much for sure, but back when I was admitted Caltech financial aid was considered very generous. I talked to many Caltech students who attended because the aid package was much better than their options elsewhere, including at MIT. Also, at the time Caltech tuition was significantly lower than its peer institutions, though my guess is that gap has probably mostly closed by now. With schools like Stanford and Harvard now offering totally funded packages to students from even moderately well-off families, today’s situation is probably less favorable to Caltech. But even back in 2007, better financial aid didn’t seem to make much difference.One additional data point - until about 2010 Caltech had a merit scholarship program offering a full ride to a very small group of its most coveted admits. This was essentially by definition more generous than anything these students could be offered by competitors. And as far as I know, no close competitor gave out merit scholarships like this, so the financial upside for these kids was probably significant. But matriculation of these admits was very low, something like 25%, to the point where the school cut the programs and reallocated the resources to need-based aid. (That logic never made sense to me given that money not accepted wasn’t really spent, but there’s probably some explanation within the byzantine world of bureaucratic funding.) So the financial aid margin just doesn’t seem very relevant to explaining matriculation trends at universities of this caliber.