The Department of Reception and Accommodation (RecNAcc) is responsible for the accommodation of all outstation participants and guests. The department arranges for all the inventory in the common rooms of the hostels to house outstation participants. For guest accomodation, the department has reserved rooms in VFAST, as well as in various hotels in Pilani. Rooms have also been booked in Bagar Inn in Jhunjhunu.

The department’s work also involves stall layout. According to Anshuman Sharma – the modest, unassuming CoStAAn of the department – stalls will be set up in the FD2 and FD3 lawns to host a range of exhibitions. A stall also has to be set up for the exhibition by the tear and smoke unit of the Border Security Force. The department is also in charge of setting up the track at SR lawns for the Indian Drone Racing League. Apart from this, they are responsible for giving out inventory to clubs and departments to set up their own rooms and stalls.

The department had faced difficulties while preparing accommodation for guests. An earlier miscommunication between the CoStAA and the alumni relations cell had resulted in the latter scheduling their golden jubilee event around the same time as APOGEE. As a consequence, the demand for rooms had gone up. ‘We got the information pretty late. Most of the decent rooms of the hotels outside and a majority of rooms in VFAST were already booked. So we had to look for resorts in Jhunjhunu which is 40 minutes away. The rooms costed more and the cab prices increased too. So the overall cost increased. Apart from this, there weren’t any real hiccups’, said Anshuman.

Anshuman emphasised on the need to include “technical spectacles” in the fest to make APOGEE more enjoyable to the general BITSian. The Indian Drone Racing League is being brought in specifically for this purpose. ‘25 to 30 premier full-time drone pilots will be coming down. This is First-Person View drone racing, where the footage is seen live through the goggle. We’ll put up an LCD screen to show live footage of drones passing through various loops and structures, so it becomes a very good spectacle’, he said.

Another such “spectacle” will be the exhibitions. ‘We are of the opinion that it is important to invest in exhibitions. We’re having one of the world’s most emotionally intelligent bots called the NAO which is coming down from Japan from SoftBank robotics. Then we have the Mitra bot which is an indigenously built bot made by Invento Robotics’, said Anshuman. ‘We’re also having an exhibition on underwater warfare by the Indian Navy. Commodore Indrajit Dasgupta of INS Vulsara is coming down here himself and will be giving a seminar. There’s also an exhibition by the tear and smoke unit of BSF and various other exhibitions by on-campus associations’.

Anshuman hopes such technical spectacles will cause BITSian participation to improve. While music performances by professional artists like The Local Train are sure to attract the BITSian junta, he wishes for improved BITSian participation and viewership for technical events. ‘Outstation participants don’t come for prof shows. They come to attend their respective events. It’s important to build a brand out of these events to ensure that APOGEE achieves the level of, say, IIT Mumbai’s Techfest or IIT Kanpur’s Techkriti. This is only possible if general BITSians participate in these events – either as participants or as spectators’, concluded Anshuman.