Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Engineering colleges technical events


It has become customery for the engineering colleges to organise some student-related technical event, annually.  Such events mostly consist of paper presentation, model-making, project competitions and so on. 

Recently I read one engineering college organised a conference on nano-technology. Nano is a very catchy word. How many faculty in the engineering college are carrying out research on the subject? Is there a laboratory available for the purpose in the college? All these aspects are overlooked. 

It is high time the University looks into the quality of papers published by the faculty. Serious efforts are needed to guide the faculty to carry out fruitful research work. Most faculty think carrying out research requires huge money. That is not correct and there are ample examples to prove it is wrong. The research must have high impact value, in terms of solving the techno-economic problems faced by the industry, society and the country. 

Besides, it is necessary to pay attention to the quality of projects carried out by the students at the undergraduate level. Providing proper guidance to the projects remains a largely neglected area in the engineering college. 

The organisation of technical events mentioned in the first paragraph will be useful only when the institutions improve the quality of teaching and research and also play adequate attention to the students projects. After all we require competent faculty to evaluate the students performance in these events.

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