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

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.

Things don’t change much once you get to college. Students are often engulfed in a vicious circle of tests, assignments and semester exams; and in this hectic race to secure a good GPA, the true aim of learning is forgotten. The thing is, almost everyone knows that all the theoretical things they teach you at college will never really help you much besides getting you a good GPA. So you really think that after memorizing a few problems in engineering mechanics, that you have learned something in the subject? No, not a chance. Unless you get ready to experiment, to get down and dirty with your hands, you’re not actually learning anything. You won’t be doing science.

But hold your horses; don’t we have a practical section for exactly that purpose?

Ok, just wait.  An experiment is something you do to determine the nature of the world around us, by patient observation. It requires some degree of curiosity, an inquisitive thirst for knowledge.  Applying knowledge thus gained requires even more experimentation. Agreed? Now look at an ordinary practical session in schools and colleges. You follow the instructions given in the procedure, you take down readings and complete observation and the record notebook (which seems to be most of the work devoted to practicals). Nowhere during the practicals are you actually experimenting. Practicals are another ritual to be performed by today’s students.

Even engineering and science require good creative minds, perhaps at least as much as art does. It’s hard for creativity to flourish in this kind of place where the highest rewards go not to persons of high thinking caliber but to persons who tend to memorize. To repeat what others have said requires no brain at all, to come up something totally new – that requires every bit of brain power you could muster. Many times it had been said that classes will dull your brains. Here the situation is even worse – classes will make you even forget that you have a brain.