It’s a parents’ choice

In India, the selection of engineering college is parents decision. Students don’t decide which college they want to join. At the age of 18, having just finished their 12^th, they don’t have enough maturity to choose a college to study engineering. Nor do they have sufficient financial authority to take independent decisions. So parents take an active role during this time. It is entirely parents’ responsibility to find the right college for their ward. So this article is dedicated to the Indian parents searching colleges for their children.

Know your child

The first and foremost thing you should do as a parent is to analyze the psyche of your son/daughter. Understand what your child expects from an engineering college. Not just in the academic angle but in a general view. Find out where you ward wishes to study. Does he/she prefer an urban environment or sub-urban or rural environment. Can he/she stay without you? Do they prefer to stay with parents or do they prefer to stay away from parents to learn to be independent? Does he/she have any regional or cultural preferences? Students from South india take time to adjust to cultural differences in North India and vice versa. Find out if your ward is comfortable with the food change and climate change.

Is public opinion useful?

Asking your neighbors or friends for opinion is a good thing. But they can only tell you which college suits them, they can’t tell which one suits your ward well. Their opinion is personal to their situation and not to yours. Their children may be smarter or dumber than yours. Their expectations from a college may be different from yours.

Rely Newspaper advertisements?

Don’t trust newspapers alone. Advertisements are meant to be advertisements. The very purpose of an advertisement is promotion. Don’t believe whatever is written in advertisements. Nothing can be a better check than a personal inquiry.

Get the inside story

I advice the parents to at least go to the college 2-3 times before deciding to join their ward in a college. Visit the college campus and observe. Don’t do anything else. Simply observe. God has given human beings a wonderful skills of deduction from observation. If you observe the college environment for half an hour or so, you will get a little idea about the college, how it works and about the students’ level of thinking.

Asking students for opinion inside college is a bad idea. Because students would not give your their frank opinion inside the college campus for the fear of talking against the college that holds the education and future career. You may ask students outside the college campus for a frank opinion. It is also a good idea to talk to the parents of students studying in a particular college. Again, asking teachers may not be a good idea. Teachers can’t voice a frank opinion against the colleges for which they are working.

Careful while paying admission fees

Do not pay the admission fees to unauthorized agents. Be sure to pay only to authorized agents registered with the college. I have known a case where parents of student from Bihar have lost 1 lakh rupees by paying to an unauthorized agent in Bihar.

College that fits your budget

Carefully plan your budget and decide whether or not to join your ward to a college. Think long term. Be sure whether you will be able to pay fees for all the 8 semesters in span of 4 years. I have known parents who had to sell their lands to pay fees of their students owing to the lack of forethought about the fees.

Placement is not everything

Career placement is not the only criterion for selecting a college. You should carefully examine the teaching standards of teachers in the college, facilities provided by college for education, food and health.

Make the best use of what is available

And after joining a particular college, you can’t compare the facilities of a particular college with other colleges. Once committed it’s done. You can do nothing complaning about the facilities in the colleges. Try to make the best use of the facilities given by that college.

About the author: Kanniga is a Professor in Bharath University, Chennai. She has a teaching experience of over 10 years. She holds Masters degree in Engineering and Business Administration.(M.E, M.B.A). Professor loves her work as worship. You can ask education related questions to professor via email kannigatruth@yahoo.com

Project work gets really challenging when you try to do it on your own. Doing the project on your own is a great learning experience. And it’s a great accomplishment if you are successful in doing it yourself. Finishing your project within the allotted deadline is really important. More important than the technical content of your project.

The students, irrespective of college they study and place they are located, are more or less the same. They think in similar patterns. 9 out of 10 students tend to delay their project work till the last day of project demo. Students would want to add new features at the end. Few students would want to make their project model look better in the last week. By incorporating last minute changes, students run the risk of not being able to complete their project in time. Here are few disadvantages of working on your project till the last day of demo.

Disadvantages of delaying project

1. Poor Project Report
   If you are late in winding up your project, you will tend to neglect your project report. The end result would be a poorly documented report which gives unclear picture about your project.
2. Poor preparation for Viva
   You won’t find time much time to prepare for viva session as you would be busy in getting your project to work on the day before your demo. You may also stammer during viva session when questions are being asked.
3. Less time for testing
   You’ll never be able to justify the specifications that you set for your project if you are late. Testing is nothing but checking whether or not your project is working properly in different cases.

Try to finish your project within deadlines. Below are few advantages of finishing project in time.

Advantages of finishing project early

1. More time for Documentation
   The first impression on your project to a third person comes from reading your project report. Sometimes a good project report is more useful than a good project.
2. Can check results
   If you finish your project a week before your deadlines, you will have enough time to check your results, check whether your project satisfies its specs.
3. Finish leftovers
   You will be able to finish all the modules that you had planned to build in your project. You can patch up leftovers and bring them to a finish.
4. Decorate better
   You will have time to decorate your project and make it look better. Not everyone can understand the technical details of your project prototype. Remember that your fellow students judge your project based on how cool it looks.

Tips to finalize project before deadline:

1. Make a weekly schedule
   Write down your weekly goals and plan weekly schedule. Check your progress against these goals. Try to finish at least two weeks before your demo date.
2. Keep realistic goals
   Don’t bite off more than you can swallow. Know your technical limitations. Don’t set idealistic goals or too high ambitions just to make your project sound cool among fellow students. Set the scope for your project.
3. Be an early bird
   Start as early as possible. If your project curriculum officially starts from January, start by December or even earlier.

I would like to share my friend’s experience in engineering project. He scored 75% in project not because his project was bad, but his presentation and report were bad. His project was the best one among other projects in our class. He tried to make the best technical design in the class. He worked 60 hours straight without sleep until the night before submission day. He was vexed and frustrated with the work and just dumped datasheets and notes randomly into a word document and submitted it. His design wasn’t properly readable, his presentation slides were haphazard. So he got bad grades even though his design was one of the most optimized.

It’s just a prototype not a product!

Student projects don’t have to create sophisticated gizmos. They don’t have invent a time machine like the one in this video.

Your project is a success if it just does what it promises to do. And being a student project, your project obviously has limitations and flaws. It’s not perfect. The world understands that. It’s alright if your landmine detection robot doesn’t climb a hill. It’s enough if your skifi metal robot detects an iron piece. We will call that little iron piece a landmine for now. It’s alright if your GPS device does not work with a real satellite. It’s enough if it proves a point.

The most important thing that you have to do after having decided a project idea is to define the scope of your project. Here is what I mean by scope of a project. In a broad sense, scope of your project means what your project is all about, and what your project is not about. You are defining these things clearly at the start of your project. So defining scope is what you should do before starting your project.

Here is how to define scope of your project. Create a new word document. Copy paste, the following questions in your document.  Answer each of those questions in a para or two. This is going to be the document that defines the scope of your project.

Scope of Engineering Project

• What is your Project all about?
  • What is the main objective of your project?
  • What are the desired features of your project?
  • What NOT is your project ?
• What are the requirements of your project
  • In software?
  • In hardware?
• What are the dependencies of your project?
  • Is any third party software going to be used?
  • Is any third party hardware going to be used?
  • Is any patented technology going to be used?
• In which Work Environments does your project run?

The reason why you should define the scope is to make your project objectives clear. From my experience, I can tell you that, if you don’t clearly draw boundaries of your project, you will tend to waste too much of time in doing unnecessary things. Once you and your team define a scope, you will have better clarity of what to do next in your project.

Here is an audio discussion with Sreeram on more details about defining scope of an engineering project.

International VLSI Conference held at New Delhi

This is a true story about the influence of an International conference on three friends in choosing their career paths. (I’m one of the three!).

Circa December 2007, I got a call from Sreeram, my ex-college mate from Chennai telling me about an international conference on VLSI and Embedded Systems in Hyderabad. We were pretty much tempted to go register for this conference, but the only thing that inhibited us was the price tag of registration 8000 Rs. for just three days.

I contacted Karthik, another friend of mine from Chennai. One thing that was common among three of us was that we were all Engineers from Electronics and Communication Engg. stream from engineering colleges in Chennai. Second thing was that we were CEACTIs (Confused Engineers Aspiring for Core Technical job in India) who passed out in 2007.

All the three of us were confused about choosing our career paths. Sreeram was aspiring to pursue Masters in the US. He was confused whether to take up Electrical stream or Computer science stream. Karthik was confused whether to pursue Masters or to join an IT firm in India. I was working for a reputed IT firm in pune. I was confused whether to continue in technology stream, or to pursue my passion for marketing and entrepreneurship.

None of us had a clue what to do, until we attended that international conference. We decided to shell out big money and go attend that conference. We had no idea that this conference would totally change our minds and give us a direction.

The conference was conducted in a posh international conference center in Hyderabad. The attendees of the conference were experts from the industries of VLSI, Embedded Systems and Core Electronics, professors from international universities, businessmen owning chip manufacturing companies, employees working for reputed chip related companies (such as Intel, AMD, ARM) and aspiring students studying in reputed colleges of India.

We attended few paper presentations on latest trends in VLSI, few panel discussions on future of chip manufacturing in India, visited the exhibits of sponsor Electronic related companies and last but not the least, enjoyed the royal lunch that they provided.

We had the opportunity to talk to a professor from a famous university in the USA. He also happened to be a member of selection committee of international student admissions in his university and a popular IEEE fellow. Professor was kind enough to speak with us about the criterion of selection of international students, drawbacks in Indian education and life as a graduate student in the USA.

We also spoke to few employees of Intel, AMD. We asked them how they got a job in a core electronic company. They shared their experience with the core technological companies, they compared and contrasted electronic and IT industry in India.

At the end of the conference, we were overwhelmed with a huge amount of information about the electronics trends happening in India and the world. We realised few shocking revelations, India was lacking extremely bad in chip industry when compared to the western world. There are hardly hundreds of jobs in India related to chip industry. M.Tech programs in India were far inferior to the ones in rest of the world.

It took us a couple of weeks to digest what we learnt at the conference. The conference gave us an invaluable thing, a direction to our career paths and clarity in our vision.

Sreeram realised that he should apply where his interest lies, in electrical engineering for masters instead of going behind the computer engineering stream just for the sake of getting a job.

Karthik became crystal clear about his pursuit of Masters in VLSI program in the US. He loved VLSI, he had even won few VLSI competitions in India.

I got the whole picture of the electronic and IT industry in India. I decided that I was not going to get into the myriad of electronic technologies. I wanted to be a technical marketer, a business man who sells technology.

Sreeram is now a Research Assistant in Gannon University, Karthik got an admit into VLSI stream in University of South California, I resigned my tech job and started full time blogging as a first step to my entrepreneurship.

If you are a CEACTI like us, I highly recommend you to participate in international conferences related to your field. If you are a student of electrical engineering branch check out the VLSI Conference 2010 to be conducted in Bangalore. It may change the course of your career!

This post was written by Sridhar Jammalamadaka. Add Sridhar on Facebook.