How to Select Choices for Deemed Universities Counseling?

Centalized Counseling for Deemed Universities, across India, is conducted by Medical Counseling Committee (MCC), Directorate General of Health Services, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India. Any candidate who has passed the NEET exam can participate in the all India counseling for deemed universities.

I regularly get questions on how to select choices for deemed universities counseling. I have answered them, several times, on my Twitter handle as well as at Quora forum. But I still, repeatedly, get the same question in my direct messages too. So, I decided to write a detailed article on this topic of how to select and lock choices for deemed universities.

In this article, I have covered a step-by-step approach on how to select deemed universities for choice filling/ choice locking.

Step #1 – Forget your NEET marks

Forget your NEET marks/ NEET overall rank. It has nothing to do with your choice selection. Your NEET marks/ NEET rank should never determine your choices (of course, I am not denying the fact that the rank will finally determine which college you will get).

Step #2 – Fix your budget

Decide how much you can afford for the medical education. For deemed universities, this step is very important.

Can you afford 15 lacs per year or 20 lacs per year or 25 lacs per year or you have an infinite budget? Involve your parents in the discussion.

Arrive at a number that is comfortable. The budget should not put you/ your family into huge financial burden. You can enquire with the banks to determine the possibility of educational loans.

Write down your budget on a sheet of paper. Keep in mind that you need to spend some more money for hostel, mess, books, travel, personal expenses and so on.

Step #3 – Shortlist the colleges

Shortlist the colleges that fit into your budget, established in step 2. You can use the information provided by the participating institutions at the MCC web site in this step.

Alternatively, you can use the table titled Fee Structure of Deemed Universities, 2019 provided in this web site. You can sort the colleges in ascending order of the annual fee. See the screenshot below for example.

Please note that the annual fee is only an indication. Make sure that the college does not charge too much extras on top of the annual fees. I suggest you to read this article: 10 Things You Need To Consider Before Selecting a Deemed University.

Let us say, for example, my budget is 15 lacs per year. Only 9 colleges fit into this budget. See the screenshot below of the shortlisted colleges that fit into my affordable capacity.

I am going to remove MM Medical College, Mullana from my list. Though the college charges only 15 lacs per year, there is a 10% increase of fees every year. It means my annual fee for the second year would be about 16.5 lacs.

That leaves me with just 8 colleges to choose from.

Step #4 – Sort the Colleges

Now, I need to sort the colleges shortlisted in Step 3, as per my preference.

Do a little bit of research on each of the colleges shortlisted in step 3. You can visit their websites. Google about the colleges. Search Quora or post questions seeking feedback from the candidates studying at those colleges. Collect as much information as possible.

You may look at the following information to get some understanding:

• Cutoff rank of the college in the previous years (while this cannot be completely trusted, it gives you some indication)
• Ranking of the college – look whether the college is ranked in any of the sites like NIRF, Careers360, India Today, etc.
• Age of the college – the older colleges will generally have an established infrastructure and faculty
• Proximity of the college – the closer the college to your home, the better
• and so on …

Now, with the above details collected, start writing down the colleges in the order of priority. Let us say the following is my ranking of the 9 colleges shortlisted in the previous step:

1. KMC Manipal
2. KMC Mangalore
3. Hamdard
4. Rural Medical College, Loni
5. JSS Medical College
6. KS Hegde Medical Academy
7. SDU Kolar
8. Sri Siddhartha Academy

(Note: The above list is just my ranking. Do your own research and rearrange the colleges as you deem fit).

At this step, you should not use the annual fees as a criterion to rank/ sort the colleges. If you look at my list above, I have put Sri Siddhartha Academy as the last choice, even though it is the least expensive college. The reason being that it is a recently established college; I have no idea how good it is going to be.

Alternate Steps (with location being a constraint)

If location is a constraint, then you can shortlist the colleges according to your preferred location. In such a scenario, the above steps (Steps 2 to 4) could be modified as described below:

Step 2a; Write down the location where you want to study. May be you want only colleges in Maharashtra or only colleges in Tamil Nadu or only colleges in South India, etc.

Step 3a: Shortlist the colleges based on your location. For example, if I want only colleges located within Puducherry, then my shortlisted colleges would include only Puducherry colleges.

Step 4a: Within the above colleges, I would again apply Step 4 (explained earlier) to prepare my choice list.

Conclusion

The above is the way I would choose colleges. Depending on your budget, you could add more colleges to your choice selection. If budget is not a constraint, then you should add all the colleges to your choice selection, ranked in the order as prescribed in Step 4.

I hope the above article gives you some idea about choice selection for deemed universities. Share your comments/ feedback/ queries in the comments section below.