The 21st of February will not only mark the beginning of this year’s edition of APOGEE, but also the culmination of months of continuous work by the Publication and Correspondence (PCr) CoStAAn, Alanckrit Jain. The APOGEE English Press spoke to him about his Department’s role in organising the fest.

For this year, Correspondence had been divided into four different parts: Event and region based calling, work trips, mini-fests, and the Campus Ambassador Programme. The work trips were the physical pitching of the fest to colleges in the Delhi-Jaipur region. The mini-fest was a new initiative taken up by the CoStAA, which included a broad range of events: AntiCoding, Mech Design Challenge, a quiz, and a case study on the Partition. Four such mini-fests are to be conducted across the country with the Chennai and Dehradun rounds already having been completed at the time of the interview, with a round ongoing in Thapar. The turnout for these events has been encouraging, with Alanckrit putting it at around 60 each. The Mini-APOGEE concept was initiated primarily to improve the outreach of APOGEE and to drive up participation. By holding it in centers that are not expected to contribute to the actual participation in the fest such as Chennai, Alanckrit hoped that APOGEE would grow as a brand, improving participation in the future.    

The Department has also restructured the process of calling colleges for the fest. For event based calling, instead of marketing APOGEE as a collection of individual events, events were divided in ten different categories such as Robotics, Mechanical, and Quizzing and these groups of events were pitched to a college. In the past, similar events organised by different clubs were publicised separately, but this has now changed, and the marketing of the fest has become more focussed. The Campus Ambassador Programme has also been revamped, with a live point based leader board maintained, incentivising better performance. Campus Ambassadors were given a comprehensive overview of what was expected of them, with prizes such as internships or cash rewards awarded based on their final position on the leader board.   

The fest being shifted to February has also forced the Department to adjust their work schedule, with calling starting a month earlier. Since the vacation calendar remained fixed, work that used to happen at the beginning of the second semester had to be completed in the winter break. While the change meant that clashes with the tech-fests of IIT Kanpur and Roorkee were avoided, the proximity of the fest to the mid-semester exams remains an area of concern. Accounting for all the changes made to the fest, Alanckrit estimated that the external participation would touch 600, a significant increase from the 400 students coming last year.

Ending on a personal note, Alanckrit called his experience working as the PCr APOGEE CoStAAn ‘perfect’. He believed that APOGEE had tremendous potential to grow and being an integral part in contributing to that growth has been immensely rewarding.