Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
2
GregLocock (Automotive)
(OP)
Lazily grabbed from Slashdot
Over 60 percent of the 800,000 engineering graduates that India produces annually remain unemployed, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex body for technical education in India, says. So, to make them more employable, engineering colleges across the country will now have to ensure that undergraduate students complete three internships lasting between four and eight weeks each during the course of their programme. Currently, less than one percent participate in summer internships. [...] Indians are obsessed with engineering, particularly since the IT boom. The mid-1990s saw a huge spike in the number of engineering graduates as demand increased in sectors ranging from IT to infrastructure.
Full article https://qz.com/1039617/india-is-betting-on-compuls...
That's a double edged sword I suspect. Finding internships is quite tricky for many clueless academic organisations, so maybe they'll pull out of claiming to teach engineering, thereby reducing the number of engineering students.
Over 60 percent of the 800,000 engineering graduates that India produces annually remain unemployed, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex body for technical education in India, says. So, to make them more employable, engineering colleges across the country will now have to ensure that undergraduate students complete three internships lasting between four and eight weeks each during the course of their programme. Currently, less than one percent participate in summer internships. [...] Indians are obsessed with engineering, particularly since the IT boom. The mid-1990s saw a huge spike in the number of engineering graduates as demand increased in sectors ranging from IT to infrastructure.
Full article https://qz.com/1039617/india-is-betting-on-compuls...
That's a double edged sword I suspect. Finding internships is quite tricky for many clueless academic organisations, so maybe they'll pull out of claiming to teach engineering, thereby reducing the number of engineering students.
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
I think we all suffer from the Indian IT push. There's a major software product I used for a couple decades that made a left turn in terms of rate of improvement as soon as development hit Hyderabad and I suspect it's the tech teaching there that favors unproductive theoretical practices that eats deeply into the UI and performance.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
God made the integers, all else is the work of man. - Leopold Kroenecker
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
My course had industrial sponsorship (a.k.a. internship) as a requirement. Oddly, not many of my peers went back to their sponsors, or even stayed in engineering.
No amount of government intervention is going to change the boundary conditions. You can't create a need for more engineering jobs, even if you can better educate/train the students for them.
Steve
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
I sort of fell into a middle group. While I needed whatever I could earn (I never got a cent from 'daddy') I did have a four-year, full-tuition scholarship and qualified for student loans and worked as an RA in the dorm to cover room & board, at least until I got married. So for my summers, I found work that would benefit me long term in my chosen career. For three summers, plus a 16 month stint where I temporarily left school to get married, I worked as a mechanical draftsman for the company that I eventually went to work full time after I graduated. Each year I was given a bit more responsibility and had a chance to get more involved in the actual engineering of the their products (it helped that the director of engineering went to the same school as I was going to). Anyway, after I graduated I was offered a full-time job, with an above average starting salary as well as 25 months of seniority. I was able to hit the ground running since in essence I didn't need to go through any sort of training/probation period as they already knew what I was capable of and I already knew their product line, manufacturing capabilities, the company staff and even a few customers. It was the best thing that I could have done, despite having to start out with what many would say was minimal wages those first couple of summers.
That being said, in those days, you had to take it upon yourself to find relevant, yet albeit temporary, opportunities outside of school that didn't interfere with your classes. Also note that during my last two years, while in school, I worked for the ME-EM department as a lab tech and draftsman. I also ran the department darkroom (this was the late 60's/early 70's, so it still required a lot of 'wet work in the dark') and provided photography services for many of the graduate students and faculty.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
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RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
TTFN (ta ta for now)
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RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Regrettably it's not just India that is over-training engineers in relation to market demand for their skills. Canada has a big head start on that. Already only 30% of our engineering grads work as engineers, despite the fact that when surveyed in 4th year, well over 90% of students who aren't staying on to do graduate studies intend to seek employment in the engineering field. Sorry folks, but as the low skill jobs evaporate from the economy, there just isn't a cushy white-collar job waiting for everyone to take. Engineers are merely the canaries in the coalmine on this trend.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
I don't know what to say about mandating internships. I think that they are a good thing but it is hard to not think that mandatory internships are amounting to cheap labor when there is such an oversupply of engineers in India. If there wasn't such an oversupply of engineers, they wouldn't need to be mandating internships. Companies would be tracking students down to try to get them to intern with them and be paying them desirable intern wages. As is, companies don't want them and if they want them they only want them if they work cheap or free.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
In this time, I thing that many more people are being encouraged, cajoled, or coerced into majoring in engineering, but their hearts and minds are elsewhere. Not that many 18 yr olds are really cognizant of what their life's dreams are.
On a slightly sadder note, UC Irvine rescinded about 500 admissions, some by mistake, some apparently intentionally, because they overbooked for the fall.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Personally I have thoroughly enjoyed mentoring interns and look forward to more opportunities in the future. I have seen colleagues struggle to make use of them while completing their own work, often resulting in the intern being bored/underused while work slows for those around them. Maybe I've just been blessed with extraordinary interns, but they have always somehow become an extension of myself and the arrangement mutually beneficial.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Just as my kid competed against 90,000 applicants to a state university this March, and every little bit of additional resume entries helped boost his standing against his competitors, his internships and job experiences are going to have to separate him from the hordes of graduates in 4 years looking for the same job opportunities. My older son did internship stints every summer, building his resume up from doing simple technician-level things, to programming apps for a media company, to programming live code for a large software company. So, he's now got a good job, and a large skill set.
For budding programmers, hackathon participation can also be a good thing to put on resumes.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
My middle son (who's now 43) had 5 or 6 AP credits when he went to school to get his degree in psychology, after which he decided that he'd rather be a pastry chef so then it was off to culinary school. That being said, his BS in Psychology is actually helping him now as he's teaching baking arts at the art center in LA.
Now I've got a granddaughter, age 14, who in Middle School was already taking AP classes, and she'll be a freshman this fall and all of her classes but one (math) are AP level. And the next granddaughter, who's only 12, is just going into middle school and it looks like she may get the full AP load from the get-go as the teachers tell us, based on her test scores, she's already ahead of virtually all her classmates. Luckily they go to a very good school with a reputation for supporting talented students so we have high hopes for them. In fact, I've been working on the 12 year old trying to keep her interests up as she may be my only hole for an engineer in the bunch. None of our three sons showed any engineering talent and while we still have a three year old granddaughter in the wings, of the other four only the youngest, the 12 year old, has given any indication that she might like to explore engineering or at least one of the heavier sciences.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Where I work now, we actively recruit engineering students to work. They are cheaper labor, but they also gain valuable experience and education. We actually have a education program with "classes" they can take to help them understand the engineering behind what we do. It supplements their college classes.
So, like it or not, interning and/or co-oping has been a good thing in my experience.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
At the utility I worked at in PA, we used to get kids from Drexel quite a bit. I was less than impressed with what we got. There was a guy from University of Delaware that turned out to be pretty good.
Where I am at now, I have two under my direct supervision from Texas A&M (one just finished masters and the other just finished freshmen year). Both of them have been pretty good, so I don't have any complaints.
My personal experience, I never took any AP classes, never did any internships, graduated with a 3.95 GPA from a state school in Florida and had about a dozen job offers over a three month span when I finished school. I did work for seven years though between finishing high school and starting college (though not in anything related to engineering), so that may have helped since I wasn't the typical "kid" right out of college.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
As far as the benefit to employers: for us, co-op students allow us to throw away the almost useless process of interviewing as a means of selecting new team members. We use the (nearly useless) interview process only to select candidates for a very low risk 4 month co-op paid internship, which is basically a 4 month long interview. Those surviving the 1st interview (and by that I mean people who we like AND who like us and what we do) are usually brought back for a 2nd 4-month interview. Not only are early skills developed on the job in our work environment so we have at least some control over how they're attained and to what level, at the end of the day we are nearly 100% assured that the very best of those interns who we may pick up as junior engineers are a good fit with our team, our work style and our corporate culture.
OF COURSE anyone walking in the door for an interview is at a disadvantage relative to one of our former co-ops when competing for the limited number of entry-level jobs! The former co-op student represents a lower risk of becoming a bad hire. But even when comparing the resumes of co-op and non-co-op fresh grads, there is absolutely no comparison: the co-ops are much more reliably ready to hit the ground running, reducing the barrier to fresh grad employment that many employers fear.
There remains the danger of co-ops becoming "part of the furniture", i.e. getting hired because they become "familiar", or become buddies with certain staff rather than due to having the best overall on the job performance. That's why we don't like 16 month "experience year" co-op placements, and prefer the 4 month placements over 8 month placements. You'd have to be a really tough-minded businessperson (i.e. lacking in compassion) to turf a co-op prior to the end of their term even if they're terrible, and you can put up with anyone for 4 months. Putting up with a poor candidate for 8 or 16 months can be a real toothache...remember, the nearly useless interview process is the only thing standing between the selection of a great candidate and selecting a terrible one.
Another thing the co-op system brings to employers is it gives them PLENTY of practice doing interviews...over time, you can improve the interview process from its inherent nearly utter uselessness to at least being somewhat useful as a filter against certain types of candidates that have proven to be a bad fit in past.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Ditto for my alma mater too. NSWIT/UTS (in Sydney, Australia) was (and still is) a co-op university by "sandwich" or "partime". "Sandwich" was 6 months work/6 months study, repeat for 6 years. Always paid 'co-op' work programs.
My younger brother is a structural engineer too, and graduated from the same uni as I, and attended U of Waterloo for 1 year as an exchange student - the co-op program at Waterloo is very good. I worked in Toronto for a few years in a consulting office and the U of W grads were excellent - very practical thinkers.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
How free internships will affect Indian students is out of my realm... but in my experience, every H1B I've ever worked closely with has struggled MIGHTILY with the difference between the way you solve the example problems in the back of an engineering text, and the way you solve actual problems in the real world where budgets and timing and serviceability and simplicity and consistency and standards are important. Seems to me it will do some good for their median level of real-world engineering competency.
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
RE: Indian engineering education - make internships compulsory
Education should be a means to build upon a talent or passion, not just open a door, or raise one's net potential. However, more often than not, it's just that. Meanwhile, talented individuals get displaced by "educated" ones.
I'd like to see more internships, with the idea of "discovering" engineers.