Writer’s Note: Before going through this introduction, please go through this post
Always wanted to confuse those relatives and friends by telling them you study the Humanities in IIT, eh? You've always wanted to study the Humanities and the Social Sciences, but never knew where to begin, eh? Then, welcome, aspiring freshie, to your path to achieve this, to study an MA in IIT-Madras’s Humanities and Social Sciences Department, to a world of endless late night chats about the dialectic method, of studying the Liberal Arts in a Tech School and all its positives and negatives. The only thing standing between you and this 🎶whole new world🎶, is the Humanities and Social Sciences Entrance Exam, or HSEE!
As you may have already understood, this exam comprises of two parts: a multiple choice section of 144 marks, testing your comprehension and conceptual mastery in Mathematics, English, and the Humanities and the Social Sciences sui generis, as well as an essay, assessed in our year out of 30 marks, testing your understanding of language and the core concepts of subject areas such as Economics, History, and Political Sciences in the context of what’s going on around you in the world. If you were intimidated, scared, and were going to close this page, to go back to binge watching, then please do wait.
We all were scared before writing this exam, severely underestimating ourselves, thinking we’d be unable to even secure a rank, let alone a seat in IIT. We all were surprised beyond anything when we had realized that we had indeed made it into IIT Madras. Yet, please, please, don’t give up, or lose heart when looking at the syllabus and all its breadth in content. A mountain peak may seem like a destination too far off to even attempt, but individual steps aren’t. Plus, we, your potential seniors, the coolest and smartest peeps y’all will ever get to know (hehe) are here with this blog just to help you, so do not lose heart! Through our series of posts by our contributors, we’d be vivisecting this exam, format and content, just for you, dear HSEE candidates, so that you may get under the exam’s skin to better understand it and finally, crack it. Some of our correspondents would even be talking about the humans of our Department Computer Facility, or DCF, where we relax and trade fundaes like no one’s business. We’d be sharing with all of you the perks of being an IIT-ian, from 2am Maggi at Ramu, to unlimited WiFi anywhere you go, to running into some of the nation’s leading experts in political philosophy and computational linguistics over a coffee-and-samosa break in Usha. So, dear, potential freshies, strap in, ‘cause y’all are gonna learn a ton about getting into the place where you're gonna have the best times of your lives :)
