Engineering education in India: The idioticity of it
"Mech engg a bit hit, IT dumped" - screams the news article in TOI, Chennai.
Wtf! Does today's generation have no sense or are they as dumb as I think them to be? Bad enough that engineering education in India is a big f'ing fraud except maybe for a handful of colleges like the IITs, NITs and BITS. Worse still is that the students going into colleges outside of these have no sense of what they want to achieve in life nor seem to have a purpose behind selecting an engineering stream.
From what i recollect, this is how the flow has been.... Yr 2000.. the year that I passed out of school. IT was the f'ing biggest hit! All the top rankers just flocked to take up IT. It was gobbled up so f'ing fast that I had to settle for a payment seat at SVCE after getting a rank of around 900ish in the entrance exam. I knew i wanted to be a computer engg. I knew i hated electronics. I knew i was not built for Mechanical. I knew what i was going to do after engineering. I didn't understand what Electrical, Chemical & the other branches existed for. India was getting onto the global stage with IT being the pedestal. It was a no brainer that one should get into either CSE/IT to ride the wave. I had a ball of a time at SVCE given that almost all the toppers had chosen for IT. Clearly the toppers of the 2004 passing out batch of all engineering colleges was those in the IT & CSE dept. The placements were not like the last couple of yrs.. A handful of companies visited campus and you would really have to fight it out to get in them. (Unlike 2006-2007 when a Infy-Wipro-TCS bus comes an almost 80% of the batch is immediately 'placed')
Slowly the sheen for IT wore off and suddenly i guess among those who joined in 2004-07, ECE became the hot subject... WTF! where's the f'ing scope for a subject like ECE in India? There are only a countable number of semiconductor firms in India and their headcount can be sufficed just with IITians... where the f is the scope for the non-IITians? Maybe higher studies... job scope in India.... almost zilch... the only stupid rationale i could hear is that.... "In case IT goes down, we would still have another line of career to go it"- Hilarious shit... I would anyday lay-off a non-CSE/IT engineer from an IT firm first over a software engineer
If you probe a bit deeper... u'll understand certain interesting dynamics... its more like a vicious circle... as ECE became the hot subject, the toppers would tend to join ECE and the dumber ones would opt to join IT. And when the 'no-brainer' companies Infy-TCS-Wipro come in, all they want is ppl who can think... given the course content and pedagogy of teaching in the local colleges... there's f'king no value the college adds to a candidate and so naturally these companies will start recruiting ECE engineers over IT engineers. And once these ECE engineers join one of these IT orgs, their so called alternate ECE career meets a dead end..never to revive again.. (not that they would have had any opportunities in their alternate career)
And come 2009, with the recession taking its toll, the most obvious effects are seen on the IT industry and suddenly everyone thinks Mech is the next big thing... wtf! .. i still reiterate where is the scope for any non-CSE/IT career for a Tier 2/3 engg.. college grad? At the end of the next 4 yrs, in all prob, you'll still send up joining one of the IT service providers and struggling to cope up there because you are doing some job that is no way linked to your mechanical background!
I have no idea why i typed out this piece... maybe its just plain frustration on knowing that ppl are opting for branches based on short term dynamics without no consideration for personal strenghts and likings!
In short, core engineering sectors will have scope only in Tier 1 engineering colleges (IIT/NIT/BITS).
Wtf! Does today's generation have no sense or are they as dumb as I think them to be? Bad enough that engineering education in India is a big f'ing fraud except maybe for a handful of colleges like the IITs, NITs and BITS. Worse still is that the students going into colleges outside of these have no sense of what they want to achieve in life nor seem to have a purpose behind selecting an engineering stream.
From what i recollect, this is how the flow has been.... Yr 2000.. the year that I passed out of school. IT was the f'ing biggest hit! All the top rankers just flocked to take up IT. It was gobbled up so f'ing fast that I had to settle for a payment seat at SVCE after getting a rank of around 900ish in the entrance exam. I knew i wanted to be a computer engg. I knew i hated electronics. I knew i was not built for Mechanical. I knew what i was going to do after engineering. I didn't understand what Electrical, Chemical & the other branches existed for. India was getting onto the global stage with IT being the pedestal. It was a no brainer that one should get into either CSE/IT to ride the wave. I had a ball of a time at SVCE given that almost all the toppers had chosen for IT. Clearly the toppers of the 2004 passing out batch of all engineering colleges was those in the IT & CSE dept. The placements were not like the last couple of yrs.. A handful of companies visited campus and you would really have to fight it out to get in them. (Unlike 2006-2007 when a Infy-Wipro-TCS bus comes an almost 80% of the batch is immediately 'placed')
Slowly the sheen for IT wore off and suddenly i guess among those who joined in 2004-07, ECE became the hot subject... WTF! where's the f'ing scope for a subject like ECE in India? There are only a countable number of semiconductor firms in India and their headcount can be sufficed just with IITians... where the f is the scope for the non-IITians? Maybe higher studies... job scope in India.... almost zilch... the only stupid rationale i could hear is that.... "In case IT goes down, we would still have another line of career to go it"- Hilarious shit... I would anyday lay-off a non-CSE/IT engineer from an IT firm first over a software engineer
If you probe a bit deeper... u'll understand certain interesting dynamics... its more like a vicious circle... as ECE became the hot subject, the toppers would tend to join ECE and the dumber ones would opt to join IT. And when the 'no-brainer' companies Infy-TCS-Wipro come in, all they want is ppl who can think... given the course content and pedagogy of teaching in the local colleges... there's f'king no value the college adds to a candidate and so naturally these companies will start recruiting ECE engineers over IT engineers. And once these ECE engineers join one of these IT orgs, their so called alternate ECE career meets a dead end..never to revive again.. (not that they would have had any opportunities in their alternate career)
And come 2009, with the recession taking its toll, the most obvious effects are seen on the IT industry and suddenly everyone thinks Mech is the next big thing... wtf! .. i still reiterate where is the scope for any non-CSE/IT career for a Tier 2/3 engg.. college grad? At the end of the next 4 yrs, in all prob, you'll still send up joining one of the IT service providers and struggling to cope up there because you are doing some job that is no way linked to your mechanical background!
I have no idea why i typed out this piece... maybe its just plain frustration on knowing that ppl are opting for branches based on short term dynamics without no consideration for personal strenghts and likings!
In short, core engineering sectors will have scope only in Tier 1 engineering colleges (IIT/NIT/BITS).
posted by Bobby at 6:09 AM
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