Engineering College Department Improvements

Background
Being an industry representative of several Departmental Advisory Board (DAB) meetings, I am often presented the achievements of the department (in an Engineering college) and then asked to give suggestion on ways they can improve the overall performance of the department. Most often there are other acclaimed representatives from academic institutes in addition to the departmental staff and the college alumni, current students and in some cases the parents of the student. It is a healthy mix of in terms of age range and also the stake holders. Generally these meetings go on for about 120 minutes.

The Need
While it is possible that DAB meetings are mandated by the AICTE it does benefit the department if ofcourse the ideas get implemented or accepted by the management especially because these implementations have a cost implications.

My suggestions (not structured on purpose)

1. Be more visible on the social media. While there is possibility of being criticized by the students especially the one with a grouse. A kid who wants to join the institute today needs more easy to understand information on the social media. Get yourself a facebook, twitter handle, may be a youtube channel, instagram, ... This way your will reach out to more of your future students.
2. Involve your alumni. Set up a alumni network get them involved. They know the shortcoming of the department and they will speak it out with a genuine intent of making their almamater better. Sometime they might end up sponsoring internships for your students. Win-win.
3. Always find metrics to measure your success. It is one thing to present the work done by the department and it another thing to measure it. How much can the success of the departmental events (holding a conference, workshop, cracking a hackaton, etc) be attributed to the students and how much due to the involvement of the faculty. Most of the success should be attributed to the faculty so that you can repeat the success. 
4. Good students will definitely lead to good results, with or without the involvement of the faculty members. So always measure how many -not-so-good-students turned out to be good students at the end of four years. This measure speaks of the work put in by the faculty members of the department. Which means you have a geared up faculty members who can turn out good students. 
1. The message is to analyze the performance of all the students and not just the top three or four.
2. It is also important to deep dive to find out about the few students who might have failed (most colleges I go to have a very high pass percentage) - because if you figure this out you would have found the root cause and address it.
5. It is one thing to have a library and have xyz number of books (just because AICTE mandates!) but it is best to measure its use in terms of what is being used and how much of the facuility is being used.
6. When you measure the performance also look for temporal data. This will give you a feel for how you have been doing in terms of time. If you did well this year but it was not as good as the previous year ... may be there is something to analyze.
7. Give self-time to the faculty in the department. While a few might misuse it .. the majority will come out with ideas that will help improve the functioning of the department. Might be able to allow them to plan research funding etc.
8. Aim to get better ranked students. If your intake is via an entrance exam then the best measure of a departmental success is the entry and exit rank. This is a good metric of the performance of the department. If your ranks are getting fatter .. then you are doing something incorrect.
9. Get students to collaborate and insist on multi-departmental projects. Try and involve external people (say from industry) during selection of projects. In some way the need of the industry gets embedded into the student project
10. If publishing conference papers is a criteria (which often is!) then form a faculty group and select projects and supervise them with an aim that each project results in a publication. 
11. Engage senior retired professors so that the young faculty in your college will have some support to fine tune their projects proposals so that they are funded (Funded projects is a big deal in most colleges)
12. Get your students to present their projects. Video record and youtube them. These will act as a source of information for first and second year students as well as will play a good role in getting your future students interested in your department
13. Plan student projects that can have an impact. Make sure the project continue from one batch to another
14. Have someone be on the look out for what other colleges are doing, learn from them, it is alright to imitate them if it can result in your performance improvement 
15. And more .... 

All these suggestions are of some use if the management is genuinely interested in growing its institute, the faculty is  committed and the students are not averse to learning in  a classroom when so much digital courses and data is available.

Endnote
The suggestions will always be incomplete ;-)

External Examiner of a Masters Thesis

Background

I often receive requests for examining thesis (mostly Masters in Engineering). Nothing to do with me, but to do with  my current job profile!

Note
This my incomplete list of Do's and Don't. Mostly written in one sitting.

Why am I writing it?

After having had to go through some painfully lengthy presentations which spoke more about the literature and less of what the student actually did!  And having had to listen to several supervisor say "I am not actually the project supervisor and I had to step in because of " to avoid any responsibility of what is being presented! I thought these tips will help the student plan in advance and speak their best.

Since I interact with the supervisor who organizes the evaluation. I will write as if I am addressing the supervisor; but the student should, they were to read, get the intent. 

Few Suggestions

Please have the student do the following 

• Start with 10 minutes demonstration if there is something to be shown as part of the work {this give a good perspective to the thesis}
• A strict 30 minutes presentation {at best 15-18 slides}
• The first slide should contain the duration of the project and the number of hours spend on the project (example, Jan 2018 - July 2018; xxx hours) {this again gives a good perspective of the time spent in the project}
  
• Start with the problem statement and highlight the main contribution of the work done {this should allow the student to think what they have contributed to the overall literature}
  
• Concentrate on the work done rather than the literature (they could have the literature as backup slides - which they can refer to if required - but not to be presented)
• Make sure the presenter knows what ever is written on the slide {there is no point in putting details that the presenter does not know, often happens with literature}
  
• Ask them to spend a slide or two (and time) on the experimental results and analysis 
• let them use graphs {when applicable}, 
• highlight what they want to talk about in the tables; 
• clearly articulate what they want the listener to gain from the tables|charts
• Numerical if shown should be limited to two digits after the decimal {do not use 0.56892; use instead 0.57 to make it human readable}
• They should be familiar with the mathematical expression on the slide - let them not put it without understanding 
• They should proof read their thesis and the slides used for presentation
• No more than 4-5 sentences in a slide
• Do not read what is there on the slide {the examiner can do it too}
  
• Use bullets instead of complete sentences
• Time your presentation {a rehearsal  definitely helps}