I'm a First-Year ECE Student Trying to Figure Out "The Prestige Path" vs. Just Building Stuff

Hey Effess! Thanks for the mention and glad I could be of assistance :D

For the questions,

if you picked either path, what did the time before your decision and the years after actually feel like?

Path 2. Although getting good grades is a must, it's not really "required" to get a job. A lot of people tend to get good grades but ended up still job hunting to this very day. I would focus on building instead of just being a person who knows 100% of Syntax and not knowing how to build.

For embedded jobs, does a top college name or campus placements matter, or does a solid GitHub do the same job? (Curious how this differs by country.)

In the US, in my opinion, going to top colleges doesn't really matter. If you are going to top colleges, I would recommend you to start meeting new people ASAP since usually top colleges tend to have professors who are well known in the country and it's a good idea to connect with them for opportunities. Either way, if you are going to a college, make good use of it. Don't do the bare minimum. In other words, "I buy this piano, so I use the whole Piano" lol.

Hope this helps :)

@xulingfeng is here! 🥳 What's your opinion!?

I believe university plays a very important role in one's career path, although a GitHub profile—filled with valuable repositories—is also a great indicator of an individual's high caliber.
Attend a good university and connect with high-quality peers. At a good university, you will find friends who know the path to professional growth. Surround yourself with people who are at a higher level than you—or, at the very least, on par with you.

The fact that you’re a first-year with four years and a clear target is the real advantage here, more than either path. For embedded specifically, here’s the honest version from what I’ve seen of how that field hires.

Path 2 isn’t really a gamble for embedded. In India and honestly everywhere, embedded employers hire on demonstrated work: a GitHub with real firmware projects, bare-metal C, RTOS, sensor bring-up, the debugging stories behind them. A portfolio of that beats most resumes. Your ESP32 course work already counts as the start of that.

The GATE/IIT path is genuinely strong if you want an M.Tech, research, or big-company campus placements. The trick is it doesn’t have to be decided now. One thing at a time is smart, so do this: spend years one and two building (one finished project beats ten half-started ones), keep your semester grades healthy so the GATE door stays open, and let year three be the decision point based on which work actually felt alive to you. A GATE score stays valid for three years, so building first never closes that door.

Either way, keep building. The people I’ve seen struggle are the ones who treated four years as planning time. You’re already past that.

Thanks for the mention 🥰

I don't want to start that long conversation again, but here are some points that may be helpful to you:

• Listen to other people, but make your own decision ✊
• Focus more on knowledge and real work, and less on such discussions 🤣
• Because of competition with China, US has already started new initiatives with India in the acceleration of semiconductor technologies. So, both Path 1 and Path 2 has great near future potentials for you.
• That said, penetration in big industries will not be possible without higher education like what's available in IIT/NIT. Your personal GitHub projects will give you opportunities in smaller electronics industries and startups, but not in the big ones. So trade carefully.

Whatever you decide, all the best wishes to you 🥰

Thanks for the mention! I can't speak from experience about embedded hiring in India, but your move from planning to building suggests a useful next question: can someone else inspect the project without owning your board? Alongside the code, I'd include the wiring, a short demo, and one captured failure with how you diagnosed it. That gives a person you contact something specific to critique, rather than asking them to judge an entire four-year plan.

Glad you picked the building path. One habit that pays off later: keep a one-page log for each project, what it does, the hardest bug you hit, and what you learned. When interview season comes, those logs turn straight into stories you can tell about your own work. Keep building, and good luck with embedded.

I'm an EE in the states (and actually went to school with some IIT grads) so I can only tell you how things are in the US.

To answer your question, like most things: it depends on what you want.

If you're trying to work for a "name-brand" company, there is a short-list of engineering programs that said companies recruit from. Samsung, NVIDIA, Intel, etc. send recruiters to a small list of engineering schools every year to source talent. It's still possible to work at a Fortune 100 company without attending one of those schools, but you will have to do more networking to accomplish this.

If you just want to learn and work on cool projects, you'll probably have much more ownership of complex products at a mid-sized company or startup then a massive corporation. You'll also see your work ship to real customers more often too.

In both cases, you cannot escape the aforementioned networking. Whether your attend an NIT/IIT or if you focus on a portfolio, the most important factor of post-grad success is who you know. The advantage of going to a top-ranked school is having friends/classmates who secure positions at the biggest companies in the world.

Now for a personal anecdote. When I was in your shoes, I choose path 1 and found that the safe path was not what I wanted and diverted to path 2 after receiving an undergraduate degree. I've received more compliments on my portfolio than for my "prestigious" diploma. This isn't to say that either path is better. Instead, I'm saying that you can change your mind without tanking your career. Ask 10 senior engineers their path and you'll get 10 different answers. What's most important is you enjoy the process and don't burn out in the mean time.😁

Effess, thanks for the mention — honored to be on that list. You walked in torn and walked out with a decision and a build plan, which is exactly the right instinct. Keep shipping, keep the project log, and your GitHub will do the talking.

This is the classic fork in the road for engineering students, and it’s a brilliant dilemma to grapple with in your very first year! For fields like software engineering, the "build stuff and show your GitHub" route has largely decoupled from elite college tags. But for specialized hardware domains like embedded systems, the calculus is a bit different because of hardware access, lab equipment, and traditional hiring pipelines.

The IIT/NIT route gives you instant pedigree, structured peer groups, and heavy-hitting campus placements that open doors without a fight. On the flip side, building real embedded systems—soldering, debugging microcontrollers, writing bare-metal C, and reading datasheets—teaches you the intuition that no exam can test. Since you have four full years, the magic isn't necessarily in picking one and abandoning the other immediately, but recognizing that building a killer portfolio actually makes you a better engineer, regardless of whether you end up taking GATE down the road.