Industry Academia Collaboration

The industry and the academic Institute interaction has been always a topic importance of which has been acknowledged from both sides. The practical constraints tend to restrict concrete steps taken to make improvement in this area. Most of the time industry keeps on providing the feedback that the graduates they get from the academic Institute are far from industry ready state. Yesterday I had opportunity to visit one of the leading academic Institute in Mumbai which recently become autonomous. They have seized this opportunity and are in process of revising their syllabus. I really appreciate the initiative taken by the institute to reach out to the professionals from the various fields and seek their inputs in the syllabus formation. 

Below are the key suggestions which came from the industry professionals 

1. The faculty interaction with industry was clearly called out as major area of opportunity. The internship for the faculty was one of the options proposed to improve on this front. 
2. Change in the internship pattern for the students. Reserve the 8th semester entirely for the internship. On this point, the principal clearly called out the challenges with this approach.  It is mandatory for the institutes to maintain desired student to Professor ratio. Letting students go out for the entire 8th semester is likely to affect this ratio adversely. 
3. Awareness of the all the job families and not to focus only on the development and Quality Assurance family. 
4. Outdated syllabus for topics such as cloud was called out as area of opportunity. Also need to introduce these topics earlier in the engineering course instead of 7th or 8th semester was called upon.
5. One participant called about need to develop awareness of concepts such as diversity, ethics and proprietary code. 
6. Another point discussed was about reluctance from the part of the fresh graduate to relocate to another City to take job offered in campus. General opinion was that at this stage of the career they should be willing to relocate.  Student exchange program idea was floated which would help student to be mentally prepared for this. 
7. Awareness of the standards in the engineering field was called out as area of opportunity for fresh graduates by one of the professionals. 
8. Performance testing awareness was called as as another area of opportunity. 
9. It was interesting to see that Institute was offering courses beyond its regular Credit System in the areas such as Legal, Patent, Philanthropy.  Definitely the institute has taken significant effort 2 develop the personality of the students.
10. One suggestion was made to get rid of the irrelevant subjects from the curriculum. The college has already taken the steps in the right direction. They had got rid of workshop, manual drawing from the first year syllabus for certain branches. The subject of Basic Electrical and Electronics famously known as BEE has been customized based on the branch in which  you are studying. Visiting industry professionals had different view on this topic since the need varies on the field in which you are going to make career. And the Institute cannot altogether eliminate a specific topic or subject based on need of a certain profession only.
11. The institute also called out the opportunity to create their brand in the industry despite being in the top three Institute in their field.  The industry folks gave away that suggestions in terms of how they can help in that direction. 
12. One suggestion which I would like to make post fact, is about the presentation skills. 

It was really refreshing to see the welcoming attitude of the institute and specifically the head of the institute. She clearly called out that they would like to listen more in this session than to try to justify their approach. The faculty had expertise in many key areas such AI, ML, Cloud, IoT, Automation. The challenge to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing technology world was called out. 

Overall it was a great session for me to attend and take back perspective from the institute