Students test out a robot during Day Two of the fest in Dhanbad on Sunday. (Gautam Dey)

The otherwise quiet campus of Jharkhand’s lone state government-owned engineering college slipped into its fun mode on Sunday, as students brushed up their boardroom skills to battle it out for the silverware on the final day of Triveni 2012 — the annual fest of BIT-Sindri.

Institute director S.K. Singh inaugurated the two-day fest, which is being held at the civil engineering department of the institute, on Saturday amidst the presence of the heads of various departments. The event is being organised by the cradle’s student chapter, Indian Society for Technical Education.

Earlier, on its inaugural day, the event had kicked off with second year students Saurabh and Priyam hosting the audio-visual round of Most Intelligent Brach (MIB), a quiz that tested the grey cells of close to 20 participants who took part in the event.

The students, who belonged to various branches like mechanical, production, civil, chemical, mining, electrical, metallurgical, computer science engineering departments, among others, were divided into 10 groups and required to answer 10 questions in 10 seconds, in the rapid-fire mould.

MIB, was followed by Episteme — the business quiz event of the institute — which beside testing the market acumen of the students, analysed their risk taking abilities.

The 10 students, divided in five groups, who took part in the event, were required to choose questions from 100, 50 and 25 marks brackets. The quiz revolved around “higher the marks, tougher the question” rule and came with a rider of negative marking equal to half the marks bracket selected, in case of a wrong answer.

In the other events of the day, 14 final year students, including three girls, used the BIT dais to voice their opinions on various burning issues during Lead India, the extempore competition of the event.

A panel of judges, mostly head of various engineering departments, judged the students who voiced their views on various topics like “Are strike by doctors justified” or “The reasons behind the political instability in various states of the country”.

Day Two of the fest saw the students picking it up from where they had left on Saturday, with Reeling into Reality — the technical case study contest — kicking things off.

The case study contest was followed by round two of MIB, which saw the selected bunch of students who had qualified, offer solutions on various problems like the pitiable condition of sports in the country.

However, the crowds started filling in before Sangfroid, an event conceptualised on the lines of popular reality show MTV Roadies, which saw the students trying to sway the audience with a series of unusual tasks.

“The students who made it to the final round of Roadies had been selected carefully by us. The selection procedure started a month ago wherein 360 hopefuls had applied. All the participants were put through group discussions, panel interview after which there was a vote out event. Only seven who students who survived the initial contest, took part in the final round of the event on Sunday,” said final year mechanical engineering student Rahul Sankritya. He added that the fest was an annual opportunity for the students to let out their academic steam.

The event is scheduled to be wrapped up with a prize distribution ceremony on Sunday.