Clubs @ IIT Ropar
At IIT Ropar, under the BOCA (Board Of cultural Activities) and BOST (Board Of Science and technology) , we have various cultural clubs like Dance, Dramatics, Music, Photography, Fine arts, Movie, Literary, chess and technical clubs like Coding, Robotics, Design and animation, Astronomy, Quiz and puzzle,Finance and Economics, Aeromodeling, CIM club. These clubs are enthusiastically and passionately run by us students. There are regular meetings, competitions held within the college, and then the best of the club goes to participate in inter college competitions.

These clubs are open to all. You can come here and nurture your interests, start learning from scratch or further improve your skills if you are already good at your craft. The activities of these clubs give you (sometimes a much needed) re-energising break from academics.

The following is the list of Cultural Clubs-

  • Dramatics Club
  • Alankar- Music Club
  • Beat Blitz- Dance Club
  • Fine Arts Club
  • Belletrist- Literary Club
  • Chess Club
  • Movie Club
  • Arturo- Photography Club

Technical Clubs-

  • Coding Club
  • Robotics Club
  • Finance and Economics Club
  • Zenith Astronomy Club
  • Enigma-Quiz and Puzzling Club
  • Monochrome- Video Editing and Animation
  • Movie Club

You learn, you teach and you become an inseparable family. Trust me, I have made some of my strongest bonds with batchmates and seniors, at these clubs. Here we have blogs by students gladly sharing their experiences as members of the clubs. Read on….

Lights,... Camera,... Dramaa
Ooh, the Dramatics club, where each one of us is a Dramebaaz in ourselves, a nautanki at another level. There is an acting ka keda in most of us, we are indians after all. This place encourages you to feed, or rather feast that keda. The atmosphere of this club is amazing. Everyone’s inputs are welcomed and appreciated. Actually, the funnier and more irrelevant your idea, the more it is enjoyed, and all the more famous you get. In this club, you have to make literally zero efforts to get to know somebody. The atmosphere in the sessions does all the magic you need. You will make some of your strongest bonds without even realising. These relationships will go a long way in making your college life memorable, worth living and dying for. You get to meet some of the coolest seniors here, and once you work with them in the club, you only want to work with them even outside the club. We have regular sessions where there is an equal amount of fun and learning. Here, we have pushed ourselves beyond the limits of shyness and learned to express fearlessly. We took a stage play to PEC-Fest and it was a learning experience that opened our eyes. It was the first time that the then first yearites got to participate in an intra- college competition, and this experience multiplied our efforts for the club. We worked hard, day and (mostly)night, and backed a much deserved second position in Yatharth (stage play), Zeitgiest. This club has taught me that going sleepless for a night or two is not that bad a thing. It all pays off when you see your audience laughing and crying through your play, reflecting the ideas through your script. Even in the middle of all the rigorous practice sessions, not once did we forget to have fun. We all came back from each and every meeting with a sweet pain in our stomach(because of excessive laughing, obviously).

- Neha Kapoor

Life is a puzzle,putting it together a challenge
Every IITian comes into the college dreaming of working hard and successfully pursuing his interest. But amidst all the stress of academic and the pandemonium of the daily day-to-day activities in the college it is important to refresh your mind occasionally. And what better way to replenish your tired mind than to indulge in some interesting and quite intriguing puzzles and quizzes. And all this is brought to you by ENIGMA- QUIZZING AND PUZZLE CLUB. Enigma organizes events and competitions regularly thus consistently recharging and re-energizing the students’ minds. The competitions include quizzes which range from diverse general knowledge topics such as sports, history, geography and science to fun and interesting topics like Harry Potter, anime etc. Consistently active participation is seen by students in these competitions with rewards also there for the respective winners. Puzzle and logical reasoning competitions are also organized regularly to test the mental aptitude and logical reasoning ability of the students and often attract a large participation. This year enigma organized 2 events during Quintessence ( intra-college technical fest) i.e. a quiz competition on general topics and a puzzling competition.

-Ahsaas Sharma

Boredom.. Check, and Mate
I am writing this with extreme pleasure about one of the most portable clubs of IIT Ropar (you can have a meeting anywhere, a ChessBoard and the pieces are all you need) The Chess Club .I first joined the chess Club in my Freshman year (one year back), here I came to know about many Excellent Chess players with exceptional intellectual ability required to tackle difficult ChessBoard Scenarios. All of us thoroughly enjoyed with complete satisfaction solving difficult ChessBoard Problems.The Chess Club is supported by a high variety of inter-year and other exciting Championships. I used to visit the Chess Club frequently for further enhancement of my skills and we used to discuss different techniques (Ruy Lopez, Alekhine defense, King's Indian Attack, The English opening, The Dutch defense, The Stonewall attack, Sicilian Defence) to name a few.I practiced many of the endgame and mid game tactics. The Seniors, more knowledgeable and more experienced were always eager to explain different chess techniques. In the club, we frequently discussed each other's weaknesses, learned from one another's strengths and taught ourselves to be better players. It is my Great Pleasure to be a member of the chess club. Overall, this club helped me to keep myself motivated, I certainly believe that if any of the talented students join the Club then it will surely help to achieve success in future scholastic and analytical endeavor.

- Nitin Gandhi

Jab tak hai jaan, Jaane jahan, Hum naachenge
Can’t stop yourself from tapping your feet when you hear music, we know exactly how crazy it feels. The Dance club is a group of super enthusiastic people who love to shake it. Cool, sexy, funny, here you have an ever ready audience for all your moves. Well, I am a non-dancer, never learnt any form of dance ever before. But I still managed to squeeze myself into the dance team, learned and performed this beautiful form of art. I owe this club a lot of funny beginnings to a lot of amazing friendships. Here, a solo dance performance is never a solo effort, you have helpful (but mostly weird) advices pouring in from the whole gang. You are not allowed to do a thing all by yourself. Costume selection, buying props, song mixing, there are always more people, voluntarily working, than the job actually requires. From unlimited leg pulling in the sessions to pranking other people together on April fools day, everything is double fun when you do it in a group like this. The late night practices, the after practice masti, the treats from seniors; this club has given me many memories that will be cherished forever.The dance team of IIT Ropar, Beat-Blitz, as we call ourselves, has performed at Zeitgiest, IIT Ropar and also at Exodia, IIT Mandi. The trip to Mandi was absolute fun. With Antakshari all through the journey, we bonded over old bollywood songs. Given a chance, each one of us would love to relive every memory the club has made together.

- Neha Kapoor

Words and Ideas can change the world, after all The pen is mightier than The Sword
It seems difficult to sum up in a few words the immense contribution Literary Club, IIT Ropar has had to me and my personality. In the past two and a half years, I saw the club bloom from a tiny bud to a beautiful flower. I feel glad to have been a part of this club's journey. I had a delightful experience with my seniors, juniors, staff members and colleagues while working as the club's representative. The club gave me the opportunity to pursue my interests particularly of debating and elocution. Debating made me more neutral and humane, made me understand others' perspectives better, freed me of stereotypes and biases and provided better insight of the world issues. It helped me foster deep friendships with all those whom I worked with. It helped me experience the feeling of doing something productive for the institution I belong to. It gave me moments of fun, enjoyment, achievement and appreciation. All in all, it helped me make my college days memorable.

- Shubham Sharma

#include
The Coding Club of IIT Ropar is one of the most active clubs in IIT Ropar. The club for now is divided into two subgroups, one for beginners in coding, and the other for competitive coding. It plans on expanding in area related to development in the near future. The club becomes active very early on in the semester, with regular sessions happening weekly, first year students are encouraged to join the beginner sessions in their first semester itself. This not only helps them with their subjects in the IIT curriculum but also forms a strong foundation of programming from the very beginning. Intra college coding competitions are conducted by the representatives of the club, so as that students know where they stand in the college and where they need to work on. These intra college competitions also create a healthy coding culture and help students perform well in international competitive coding competitions. Students, who are already confident in their basics of programming, are not left still. The competitive doing sessions make sure they understand the common algorithms used in the IT industry very well, which also helps them in their placement interviews. IT (Information Technology) sector is undergoing rapid evolution and has a bright future, the coding club of IIT Ropar makes sure that the students of this college are a part of it.

- Karan Sehgal

Design is not just what it looks like or feels like.Design is how it works.
This club is a real platform for developing our skills in field of robotics and microcontrollers. We have a sci-fi room associated with the club where we can work peacefully in an air conditioned room. The sci-fi room has its own wi-fi. We have various micro controllers like arduino uno, atmega 16 and atmega8 along with motors, motor controllers, tyres, small chassis, wires, multimeter, lcd screens and various sensors like IR and proximity sensors. We also have some robotic arms. Members of Robotics club can access all the above at any time without any paperwork which prevents getting stuck in red tape and thus provides great freedom to students. Currently the projects going on in the Robotics club are on KUKA robotic arm(having 6 degree of freedom),robotic arm having 4 degrees of freedom, exoskeleton & swarm robotics. Classes are taken by senior students, students of M.Tech and Phd scholars. Even workshops are organised by i3Indya and entrench electronics. Most important thing of all is the bonding between various members of the club. Working is never so hectic when you have cheerful people around. Having such company enhances the effectiveness of work. Regular competitions are held all along the year which inherently helps in improving our skills and knowledge. In the year of 2016-17, we had competitions in robotics during Quintessence(intra college tech fest) and many competitions like makethon, line follower, robo wars, fury road were also held during the time of Advitiya(college tech fest). The club is never short of mentors who are always ready to help you out and lead you in the right direction. The mentors include seniors, faculty members, professors from other colleges, M.tech and phd scholars. You might also want to check out IIT Ropar’s Robotics website -www.punjrobotics.com-.

- Macha Vidyaaranya

Music is all around us, We just have to listen to it.
The day I entered iit ropar i realized that the culture in music here was really cool. Anybody at anytime in the campus can just grab a guitar and start jamming. After I was appointed as the music club representative I was damn excited to work with all the artists in college. The first thing that came into my mind was to give a name for the club. There was no other name better than ‘Alankar’ signifying music as a valuable ornament of life itself. All those moments are the golden memories of my life. The late night jamming sessions, preparations for independence day and other events, not forgetting the zeitgeist fun we all had performing on the stage in front of a crowd of hundreds of people in the events torque and symphony. The most exciting part in all of this for me as a representative was to buy new products for the club. Although it was a very long procedure and official work, but the result was all new set of instruments to try our hands on ! I was very happy to see the participation in the flash mob held in Chandigarh this year. For the first time music club took part in the flashmob and it went successful.Thanks to all the members and their efforts. Being on a position like this connected me to almost all of the students in the campus and inspired me to start producing new videos to post on the college youtube channel.

- Aditya Suryavanshi

Asli maza Sab ke Sath aata hai..
Imagine the delight when the hero vanquishes the villain, the chill when you know the “jump scare” is on its way, or the jubilance when India hits the winning runs. All these emotions escalate to another level when you have the company of your friends. This is exactly what Movie Club strives for. At IIT Ropar, each weekend brings with it an exciting and fun movie. Movie Club ensures to screen at least a movie, every weekend, so that at least once a week, every student gets to spend some quality time with their friends. Time when they can break away from their routine life and enjoy. In addition to the weekly movies also, Movie club leaves no such opportunity when the students can get together, be it the much awaited cricket matches, or football matches etc. Long story cut short, Movie Club endeavors to make a strong student culture, an environment which supports the grooming of a student into assets for the nation in the form of skilled engineers, and future leaders. Movie Club of IIT Ropar works with a commitment to give you a refreshing weekend and some “movie masala” in your college life.

TL;DR: it's amazing :)
As we all are a bit of narcissists, I too have had an interest in taking selfies from a long time and of course some amateur photos of landscape with a semi-decent phone camera at best. Here this slight interest changed into a keeda, photography ka keeda. This all started from my very first day of college.

I had tried a lot of stuff before life different sports and such, dabbed into even some drawing but nothing particularly grabbed my fascination. So there was I, on our first day, staring blankly when one of our senior was asking me about our interests. After thinking it over, I said something about cars and such and then mumbled out photography. Shockingly, that guy turned out to be the photography club rep! He advised me particularly about exploring myself, that even if I had no real skill in photography before, I should join Arturo, the Photography club of IIT Ropar and explore my interest. From that day I was eagerly waiting for the introductory session. And finally that day came and I held a DSLR for the first time. From that day I have been literally in love with it. Regular sessions were organised by the club. And it was always fun to attend these sessions. I've learned so much about that single device, DSLR that I didn't even know existed. Taking care of lighting, focus, angle and such stuff before a photo now seem to come naturally to me. Another awesome thing is that any club member can borrow a professional DSLR camera anytime at all. Whenever I still have some time to pass, I take the camera and go to the nearby canal side to click some pictures of the beautiful view there. As it's just a few footsteps from the campus, it's been an almost semi regular thing for me. I've done so much exploring in the nearby Ropar area which although lacking in malls and stuff does provide some mesmerizing natural beauty instead. We've fooled around with the cameras, took some awesomely weird photos. And there's this 100% true quote for photographers “We don’t run behind girls, girls run behind us” xD. We get to meet some of the coolest seniors there. Too many memories were created especially at night sessions. Sleepless nights were always fun. The club representatives have always been very friendly, open to suggestions and organised the sessions to our convenience. Along the way, I've also learned a lot about softwares too like Lightroom, Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro.

And hey! How can I forget about our fests. I bet no one can enjoy a fest better than us Arturo members. Very best moments of my whole year were created in the fests, where I got to meet with the stars. And the best thing is you get a personal photograph with stars. At Aarohan, Advitiya and Zeitgeist we pushed ourselves beyond the limits and after the fests our satisfaction level was touching sky. Not only fests Holi, Diwali, Vaisakhi, Samagam, Ganesh Chaturthi, Janmashtami were memorable too.

- Lakshay Narang

If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.
The Finance and Economics Club is an initiative to apprise students about various jargons related to finance and economics. It aims to promote and cultivate an environment for interactive learning about various aspects and functioning of business, financial markets and the economy as a whole for directing the minds towards the incorporation of technology in the world of business and finance.

Till now, club has been able to impart directive knowledge to the students in the above mentioned section through various events like sessions, quizzes, discussions, debates, workshops, virtual trading etc. for an effortless learning. FnE Club organized sessions on security market and personal financing, and then , couple of discussion oriented sessions was held with intent of giving a practical exposure of the market with lights on some more investment tools. Along with these sessions, a weeklong intra-college stock trading competition was organized for the real time exposure of trading FnE Club held a Start-up Workshop in collaboration with E-cell IIT Delhi for developing the entrepreneurial environment in the campus. Workshop consists of building and modeling a product from a rough idea through planning, organizing and control at different levels. They also exposed various tools regarding conduction of user and market research for product development through practical examples of few startups from different industries.

FnE had a discussion based session on demonetization policy and its post effect on various businesses, economy and the common people with lights over the intention behind such major action and inter-relating factors In the continuation series, Taxation system of India was introduced in the subsequent session with various tools and techniques regarding tax saving under section 80C which indirectly encourages savings and efficient wealth management among youth.

At the end, an interactive session with the passing out seniors put an insight over the current market situation and trending technologies being employed by various start-ups in order to build up their business and get rooted in the market. Focussed topics were the emerging science of analytics and digital marketing with cases of different start-ups using these techniques for conducting research for their product development. The knowledge of this section is also important from a manager’s point of view as it caters to various decision making problems and their evaluation criteria. Considering that it’s the second year of finance club from its foundation at IIT Ropar, a collective approach of all vibrant club members in building up a great learning environment with regular improvement and introduction of new trendy topics are highly appreciable. The Finance Club will continue to hold its directive approach for enhancing personal financing as well as thinking towards the technological demand in the business world.

- Aditya Deva


As a member of these clubs one earns a lot of experiences and cherishable memories. I would strongly advise that when you join IIT Ropar, you must attend the orientations of all the clubs and be an active member of the clubs of your choice.

Editors :
Neha Kapoor
Ambuj Gahoi