What studying BE Computer Engineering at Pokhara University is like
October 11, 2026 · 5 min read · pokhara-university, student-life, engineering
I'm in my sixth semester of the Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering at Nepal College of Information Technology (NCIT), in Balkumari, Lalitpur. NCIT is affiliated with Pokhara University. When I was deciding where to study, I went looking for honest accounts of what the programme is actually like day to day, and mostly found brochures and admission notices. So this is the post I would have wanted to read back then.
It's one student's view from one college. Things vary between colleges and batches, so read it as a perspective rather than a rulebook.
How the degree is laid out
The programme is four years long, split into eight semesters.
The early semesters are mostly foundations: mathematics, physics, programming and basic electronics. If you came in excited to build apps, these can feel far away from that. The middle years get into the core of computer engineering, things like data structures and algorithms, computer architecture, operating systems, databases and networking. The later semesters bring subjects such as compiler design, simulation and modelling and machine learning, plus electives you pick yourself.
Each semester has a similar rhythm. Classes, labs and assignments build up through the term, there are internal assessments along the way, and then it all comes down to the final exams at the end. The finals carry a lot of weight, so the last few weeks of every semester feel very different from the first few.
Projects are where it clicked for me
The part I've enjoyed most is the projects. Several subjects ask you to build something, and that's where the theory finally turns into something you can run and break.
For Simulation and Modelling, I built an interactive roller coaster queue simulation, a discrete-event simulation you can actually watch. Push the arrival rate a little past what the ride can handle and the queue explodes in front of you. I understood queueing theory better from watching that than from any lecture on it. For another course project I compared a Random Forest against a neural network for classifying thyroid disease. The dataset was heavily imbalanced, and working through that taught me more about choosing the right evaluation metric than I ever expected to learn from one assignment.
What I keep noticing is that projects and exams reward different things. An exam asks whether you know the answer. A project asks whether you can get something working when the answer isn't written down anywhere. You need both, but the second one is what I've grown most from.
The notes scramble
Every semester there's a week when the whole class goes hunting for notes and past questions at once. The material exists. It's just spread across group chats and shared folders, and a lot of it disappears after a year or two.
That annoyed me enough that I built BECE Vault, a free library of semester-wise notes, past exam papers and the syllabus for PU Computer Engineering. I wrote about how it came together in How I built BECE Vault. If you're a BECE student, it's a better starting point than the group chat.
Past questions deserve their own mention. Working through a few years of papers for a subject is one of the best ways to prepare for it. After a while you start seeing which topics come up again and again, and what level of detail the examiners actually want.
Life outside the classroom
A lot of my learning has happened outside class. Clubs, hackathons and tech events are where you meet people who are building things, and where you get used to shipping something under a deadline.
My first hackathon was the IS Hackathon, run by the IS Club at Kathmandu University School of Management (KUSOM) in June 2024. Four of us, as Team SAAAS, built a job board called JobXa over three days, and I barely knew what I was doing. Since then I've done several more, demonstrated a biometric voting machine for three days at LOCUS 2026, and placed third in Xtreme Shadows, a six-hour competitive programming contest held as a pre-event for IEEEXtreme 20.0. At NCIT I'm on the IEEE NCIT research team, I was a founding member of the CITC Club, and I helped organise TEDxNCIT 2026.
Standing next to your project for three days while strangers ask questions, and some of them try their best to break it, teaches you things about your own design that a viva never will.
The hard parts
It isn't all good, and a post like this should say that plainly.
The workload comes in waves. Some weeks are calm, and then assignments, lab reports and internal assessments all land in the same few days.
Exams can reward memorising more than understanding. It takes deliberate effort to keep learning things properly when you know a memorised answer would score the same.
Resources are uneven. How good your study material is can depend on which seniors you happen to know. That's the gap BECE Vault tries to close, but it's a real problem.
Would I choose it again?
Yes. The degree has given me a solid understanding of how computers work, from circuits up to compilers, and it pushed me to build things on top of that. The structure hands you the theory. What you build on your own time, and who you build it with, is up to you, and for me that's been the best part.
If you're about to start, I put together some practical advice in Advice for first-year engineering students in Nepal.