WITH Delhi University’s admission process set to kick off within a fortnight, a blog by a Hansraj College alumnus aims to reach out where the university’s website and college portals might fail: a one-stop site to address all admission-related queries.
Launched by Chandan Pansari, 22, ‘Delhi University Admissions Guide (DUAG)’ is interactive, answers queries, and offers counseling. And in case a student finds it difficult to decide whether the college name is more important than the course, the blog offers to sort out even that.
Aimed at reaching out primarily to outstation students seeking admission in Delhi University, http://delhiuniversity.wordpress.com was launched as a personal blog a fortnight ago but is being advertised online though tickers and search engines.
Helping Pansari in his initiative is friend Nidhi Mehra, a third-year Literature student at Hansraj. While Pansari, who works with an MNC in Gurgaon, works on the blog after office hours, Nidhi, 21, keeps track of information coming from DU’s admission office.
“DU is a huge university, but even at the centralised level it does not have an online admission process,” Pansari says. “Some colleges like St Stephen’s have online college forms but to think that one can sail through the entire admission process online is still a far cry. And whatever is available is not known to many.”
So Pansari now wants DUAG to become a one-stop blog for all queries regarding admission process. “We want to educate people on the admission process, colleges they can go to and what their preferences should be. We can tell them how each college has a different admission process and how subject combinations vary course-wise.
“This information is certainly not available on official websites. Being a DU passout, I know the kind of difficulties people usually face.”
Pansari says they received many letters, sometimes even hundred a day, within a fortnight of the blog’s launch. More than 3,500 visitors have visited the blog by now. “Blogging is something you normally do after work. The motto here is to help students from outside Delhi in the initial application processes without them having to come to the city.”
So DUAG, with a clean format, has a map to guide students across DU, separate sections on admissions, colleges, cut-off lists and a feedback section where visitors can leave queries. New sections to be introduced soon are ‘Colleges of the Week’ and ‘Courses of the Week’ that will discuss topics at length.
And while letters pouring in from parents and students, mostly from North India, have sought information on cut-offs, hostels and colleges, many wrote in just to thank them for the effort, Pansari says.
Pansari, who worked as a student counselor at Hansraj College in 2005-06, is meanwhile banking on his network of friends at the university to get the blog going further.
What’s on site
* A map to guide students across DU
* Separate sections on admissions, colleges, cut-off lists
* List of colleges
* A feedback section where visitors can leave queries
* Travel routes