Student review - Crescent school of architecture

The foremost reason for selecting Crescent School of architecture was that it was listed among the top five colleges in Chennai besides being recommended by several professors and alumni. I had also visited several architecture institutions prior to joining and was impressed by the extremely good infrastructural facilities and friendly staff. Now having completed the course, I'm grateful that I had chosen crescent over the rest of the colleges.

To become an architect has always been my dream and I'm very glad that I was lucky enough to chase my dream, thanks to the teachers to have made me what I am now. Crescent had a well planned and structured curriculum backed up by hands-on workshops every now and then. The experienced faculties offered their valuable input when needed in addition to thoroughly explaining the concepts schematically. They also guided us through our semester exams putting forward revision sessions.

There were off-campus intern programs with stipend on the 7th and 8th semester as a part of our curriculum. We worked under architects as interns and learned the practical ways of approaching a design program. Our knowledge acquired through college helped a great deal while working.

Architecture inherently is a profession where one mostly aims to set up his/ her own studio hiring a couple of interns, there are also large scale firms with multiple architects and other concerned professionals but that is rarely the case. So, no we did not have any sort of campus placements although we had a 1-year internship program where we had gained experience from talented architects, we also have successful architects positively criticizing our design every semester. All of these have groomed us well enough to find our jobs on our own.

The annual fees were 1,50,000 when I had joined and now has hiked up to 1.80,000 to the newcomers owing to the improved infrastructural facilities, however, it remained the same for me for five years. The college offers several scholarship programs depending upon merit qualification and the financial background of the student. The college also aids in the annual commutation fee if needed.

We had an amazing social life at crescent and the architecture block was specifically designed to entertain social interaction among the students. There was an annual 2-day design fest held and several cultural programs and design competitions were hosted. We also had clubs that we can a part of and the college offers cultural exchange tours to other countries. In addition to this, we had well-ventilated classrooms with studios, a two-floor library with a fair collection of books, Material lab, Computer lab, Seminar halls, canteens, and Food kiosks. There are indoor and outdoor playgrounds, gymnasiums and hostel facilities as well.

The admission process is based purely on the merit qualification of the student. The cumulative total of 12th-grade mark and NATA exams are analyzed the students have ranked accordingly. This is followed by an interview session where we were asked the reasons for choosing the course and the college, based on our answers we were admitted.