VTU says enough of theory, get real

Posted in Off Beat by karthik R On July 21, 2012. 8 Comments

The varsity held its first ‘internship mela’ on Saturday and follow it up with more to help students overcome lack of practical knowledge.Get_Real

When a student of mechanical engineering went for an interview recently, he was asked to work on a lathe. The student was perplexed and became nervous. When the interviewer asked the reason, the student replied that he had never seen a lathe.

This anecdote was narrated by none other than the vice-chancellor of Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) Dr H Maheshappa who lamented that ‘many students do not know the basics even after completing the prestigious course’. VTU will take the first step in course correction this Saturday. The biggest setback is that most master the theory but have minimal practical knowledge. This is because even though students have to submit a project report in the final year, VTU has found that many are not actually done by students. Instead, these are ‘bought’ from ‘project making companies’ and submitted to the university. To curb this practice, VTU is planning to introduce internship for students, a process which allows youngsters get first-hand experience of the corporate sector even while they are studying.
This practice is prevalent in the Indian Institute of Management and other prestigious institutions where companies from various parts of the world visit the campus to offer students a chance to intern with them. The internship is open to students from the first semester to the last, including those pursuing MBA courses. Students have been asked to send their resume and the sector in which they would like to intern. VTU has got 15,000 applications.
The university is describing the event as an ‘internship mela’, which is billed as the first such in the country. The event is conducted by Blue Tiger Learning Services. The firm’s operations manager Varun Gupta said, “We expect more than 150 companies from the banking, real estate, retail, IT and ITeS sectors. The internship can last from one day to six months. While a few companies are ready to pay a stipend to the students, others insist that learning is better than earning. Right now, we are working on matching the area of interest with companies. For example, one of the companies wants to hire web designers. We are looking for students who are good at content development or have knowledge of html and Photoshop.”
Meanwhile, the university is considering making internship compulsory for engineering students, like in the case of medical students. In that case, the challenge would be to provide placements to over 40,000 students each year.

Related Posts

Latest Comments
  1. asutosh

    hi, could u elaborate on the criteria for interning in core mechanical companies…. or if possible send some links regarding the post …thank you

    asutosh jha
    Bangalore Institute of Technology
    5th sem, Mechanical Engineering

    Reply
  2. bidar786

    VTU needs to redefine its management from framing of the syllabus, system of valuation, setting up of proper time table in such a way that minimum paper has to be clashed, in other universities two papers doesn’t clash on the same day, the gate papers of examination has to be totally removed, still VTU has many cons and itself suffers from its own inefficient system
    But the system of evaluation and revaluation is totally not tolerable
    From the above I will be much happy if their is a bit change in the system

    Reply
  3. Ishwar

    No wonder with a vice chancellor of such high caliber at the helm of affairs such things are bound to happen.
    The best remedy to set right this sort of mis-match would be to ask students to undergo internship programs conducted by the corporate sector after every semester and the entire course should be industry oriented.
    I have noticed one more lacuna in the system which is VTU doesn’t allow students upto the 6th semester to undergo internship for more than a month which is very very insufficient.
    Hope the Senate takes note of this lacuna and set right things immediately.

    Reply
  4. Deepak

    Can U pl tell me the procedure for applying? I searched the VTU site but couldn’t find any information.

    Reply
  5. CHANDAN

    hiii….will anyone say me how to apply for these internships????

    Reply
  6. KAT

    internship is a ship which sails u into a industry which is on the other shore

    Reply
  7. saual

    hi vtu says tht thy hav made intrshp for every student but is it possible for tht falilurs to wrk for the company ………

    Reply
  8. mahmood

    The gate papers of examination has to be totally removed,
    is it published vtu site ?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Never see this message again.