The Niser campus in Bhubaneswar. Picture by Sanjib Mukherjee

Bhubaneswar, March 30: The first batch of students from Niser (National Institute Science Education and Research) will graduate in May, but most of them have already made it to some of the world’s top ranked universities.

The list includes names such as Cornell University, Pennsylvania University, Stanford University, Queens University, University of Pittsburgh, Walt University of Illinois, Berlin Mathematical School, and University of Virginia among others.

Of the total 34 students who will be passing out after two months, 14 students have chosen to go overseas to pursue higher studies while others have opted to continue research in institutes such as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

Of the 24 students who appeared for the Barc tests, 16 qualified. Of the 18 students who appeared for the TIFR entrance, 12 have qualified.

This year the institute received about 16,000 applications for its 60 seats.

“We were supposed to increase the seat strength to 80 this year, but could no do so for lack of infrastructure. The intake can be increased once we move to our new campus,” said registrar A.K. Naik.

The institute plans to increase the seat strength to 300 after it moves to the new campus. This would mean a total of 1,500 undergraduate students at one time for the five-year integrated courses.

The institute also plans to take in 1,000 postgraduate students. Niser now has 70 PhD scholars. Three new branches — environmental science, earth and planetary sciences and computer sciences — will be included in the MSc integrated course in 2014 after moving to the new campus.

New programmes such as two-year MSc programmes and MSc-PhD dual degree programmes will be introduced.

Naik said construction of the new campus was on in full swing. “The construction work is on in full swing. Work on all the blocks is on simultaneously. About 25 per cent of the construction has been completed. We have spent the Rs 150 crore sanctioned for the first phase. Rs 200 crore for the second phase will be released shortly,” Naik said.

The three-year project with a budget of Rs 450 crore is coming up at Argul and the construction, which started in July last year, is being implemented by Larsen and Toubro.