Advice for first-year engineering students in Nepal
October 9, 2026 · 5 min read · student-life, engineering, career
When I started my engineering degree, everyone had advice for me. Most of it came down to either "study hard" or "relax, everyone figures it out eventually". Neither was wrong, exactly. Neither was much use either.
I'm in my sixth semester of Computer Engineering at NCIT under Pokhara University now. This is the advice I'd actually give someone walking in on their first day. Most of it applies to any engineering programme in Nepal, not just mine.
Don't write off the boring subjects
Some first-year subjects feel like they have nothing to do with why you came. Calculus, physics and basic electronics don't look much like building apps or robots.
They come back, though. The maths turns up again in algorithms, in signal processing and in machine learning. Your first programming course is the base everything else is built on. A weak foundation doesn't fall apart in first year. It falls apart in third year, when every new subject leans on it at the same time.
You don't have to love every subject. Just try not to treat any of them as something to memorise for one exam and forget the next day.
Learn one language properly before collecting more
At some point you'll feel like you need to learn everything at once: Python, JavaScript, React, machine learning, all of it. I'd push back on that.
Take the language your course teaches first, which is often C, and learn it properly. Understand pointers, how memory works and what actually happens when a program runs. Once one language really makes sense, the next one takes days to pick up instead of months.
Build things nobody asked you to build
The biggest jump in what I could do came from projects, not from classes. My first real one was JobXa, a job board I built with three friends over three days at my first hackathon in June 2024. It's rough, and I'd build it completely differently today. I also learned more in those three days than in a lot of full semesters.
A few things that helped me:
- Start small and actually finish. A small project you complete teaches you more than an ambitious one you abandon halfway.
- Put your work on GitHub, even the messy stuff. It builds the habit, and later it becomes your portfolio. My own collection of small learning projects started exactly like that.
- Build something for a problem you actually have. The project people use most, BECE Vault, started because I was tired of hunting for notes every semester.
Open the past questions early
Past exam papers are one of the most useful things you have, and most students only look at them the night before the exam.
Try opening them early in the semester instead, while the subject is still being taught. A few years of papers will show you which topics keep coming back and how much depth the examiners expect, and that gives the rest of your studying a direction. If you're at a Pokhara University college, BECE Vault has past papers sorted by subject and year.
Find your people
Join a club. Go to a hackathon. Help organise an event, even a small one. In Nepal's tech community, a lot happens through people. You hear about an internship from a senior, you meet a future teammate at a hackathon, or someone you met at an event ends up being the person you build your next project with.
Some of the most valuable things I've done came from this. I joined the research team at IEEE NCIT, helped found the CITC Club, helped organise TEDxNCIT 2026, and spent three days at LOCUS 2026 showing a biometric voting machine to anyone who walked past. You don't need to be the best programmer in the room to take part. Honestly, most people in those rooms are still figuring things out too.
Marks aren't the only scoreboard
Marks matter. They decide scholarships and they open some doors, so it's worth doing well. They just aren't the only thing that matters.
When someone looks at you for an internship or a job, they'll want to see what you can actually do. That means projects, contributions and things you've built and shipped. My first paid project was a website for a mental health consultancy in Pokhara, and it stayed live as their main site for around a year and a half. I wouldn't have got that from my grades alone. Try to finish each year with decent marks and at least one thing you're proud of having built.
Look after yourself
Engineering semesters come in waves. A few quiet weeks, then everything is due at once. What helps:
- Keep up a little every week, so the waves are smaller when they hit.
- Sleep before exams. All-nighters feel productive and mostly aren't.
- Ask for help early, from classmates, seniors or teachers. Everyone gets stuck sometimes. The people who do well are often just the ones who ask sooner.
If you only remember one thing
None of this is a secret. Learn the fundamentals, get good at one language, build things and put them online, open the past papers early, find your people, and don't let marks be the only thing you measure yourself by.
It's all much easier to start on day one than in your final year. And if you want to know what the degree itself is like, I wrote about that in What studying BE Computer Engineering at Pokhara University is like.