KEMR

This page contains my humble thoughts to improve Engineering colleges in India. And I ask you to consider these suggestions with their face value without judging my basis to say these.

Why Boundaries?

Google is a popular search engine today as we know. But when we see its intricate details, it is using concepts from Mathematics like Graph theory and Eigen vectors. Google is very fast and bring us precise results. I think it is very powerful because it has a firm mathematical foundation.

Check this original paper by its creators Anatomy of a Large Scale search Engine.

The same goes for Relational Database Management System (RDMBS) where it is actually a different physical domain of set theory. The union and intersection of tables works like the same concepts in set theory. Even Object Oriented Database Management System can't compete with RDBMS because RDBMS is mathematically sound.

My point is , for any new idea in engineering to survive , it should have a firm basis in Science and Mathematics. After all Engineering is about providing practical solutions from pure science.

So we should encourage students to have firm background in Maths and Science . Most Engineering Colleges already have Physics and Chemistry in first year and maths for 6 semesters but these three were the most neglected subjects in Engineering Colleges in India. We should recruit more staffs for these three most important subjects. And we should teach a subject about interdisciplinary activities in one semester. Institutions like Sante Fe in USA is wholly about Interdisciplinary studies which you all know. So It is time that we should forgo the strict boundaries of each disciplines.

If I take the subject of Computer Science which I know some. The variety of things that we can do ranges from a typical IT work , to Protein and DNA  modeling in a biotech industry and from simulations of a Particle collision in CERN or Fermilab to Turbulence modeling in Aircraft simulation.

If the students know the variety of jobs they can do then there will not be any problem in job hunting as everyone will search for a job which will satisfy their curiosity. So as the variety grows the competition will be minimal.

Bringing out the talents

And we should encourage students to express their thoughts better both in spoken and written form. This will give them an edge to bring out their new ideas unbashfully. For oral communication already Indian colleges were excelling as in various occasions students were taking seminars about technical as well as general topics. For written skills we should encourage the students to publish their papers which they are already doing for Symposiums to various colleges.

If a college(say my college TCE) pulls together all the papers written by it's students ,then it can publish something like Thiagarajar Undergratuate Research Journal(TURJ) in a similar way as

Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Journal(MURJ) or

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science(DUJS).

This journal can be published once in 3 months. And it can have contents like

1. News section. which may contain all news relevant to Science and Engineering.

2. All Papers submitted by TCE students to other colleges.

3. Letters to TURJ a brief original findings of any new things which also can be the thesis papers by the PG students.

This will make the students to know things and will also help them to express their technical ideas in a scientific journal level. Above all it will spark a curiosity to know things and to innovate. We can have guidelines about article writing which can be derived from IEEE journals or Nature.

And we should subscribe journals covering all areas of science like

Science

Nature, and

PNAS.

Opening the Gates

Now most of the Physical-Sciences research articles were available on-line.

Sites like CiteSeer , arXiv were a few we can name. Also powerful search engines were there to bring us what we are looking for.

So access to internet must be given to all. And a short course on Search engines should be taught like this on-line course .

Then the students will come to know the vast knowledge that is available now. This will remove any physical limitation to the access of knowledge . And this will enable a student to learn what he wants to learn which will bring a good health to the institutions.