Skip to main content

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 ;-)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing Speech Processing Challenges!

Often it is difficult to emphasize the difficulty that one faces during speech signal processing. Thanks to the large population use of speech recognition in the form of Alexa, Google Home when most of us are asking for a very limited information ("call my mother", "play the top 50 international hits" or "switch off the lights") which is quite well captured by the speech recognition engine in the form of contextual knowledge (it knows where you are; it knows your calendar, it know you parents phone number, it knows your preference, it knows your facebook likes .... ). Same Same - Different Different:   You speak X = /My voice is my password/ and I speak Y= /My voice is my password/. In speech recognition both our speech samples (X and Y) need to be recognized as "My voice is my password" while in speaker biometric X has to be attributed to you and and Y has to be attributed to me! In this blog post we try to show   visually   what it means to pro
Post a Comment
Read more

BITS Pilani Goa Campus - Some Useful Information

You have cleared the BIT Aptitude Test and have got admission to BITS Pilani Goa Campus. Congratulation . Well Done. This is how the main building looks! Read on for some useful information, especially since you are traveling for the first time to the campus and more or less you will face the same scenario that we faced! We were asked report on 29-Jul-2018 (Sunday) to take admission on, 30-Jul-2018.  We reached Madgoan (we traveled by train though the airport is pretty close to the BITS campus, primarily to allow us to carry more luggage!)at around 0700 hours (expect a few drizzles to some good rain - so carry an umbrella) on 29-July-2019. As you come out you will be hounded by several taxi drivers, but the best is to take the official pre-paid taxi. It should cost you INR 700 to reach the BITS campus. We had booked a hotel in Vasco (this is one of the closest suburb from BITS campus, a taxi should charge you around 300-350 INR; you will make plenty of trips!) and
2 comments
Read more

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers
Post a Comment
Read more