Education with self-awareness

CAMPUS WATCH

As you view the lush green lawns and majestic structures you’ll be forgiven if you mistake the area for a heritage site.

Hold your breath, this is an educational institution situated about an hour’s drive away from Bangalore — Amrita University spread across 39 acres in Sarjapur.

This institution was started at the initiative of the spiritual leader, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, popularly known as Amma, who is also the chancellor of the University.

“This place was a jungle and full of snakes, when we began,” says Brahmachari Dhanraj, a disciple of Mata Amrita, who has been a part of this institute since its inception in 2001. It was an engineering college at that time which was affiliated to VTU from 2002 to 2004. The University received its deemed status in 2004. In 2009, a business school was started in Amrita University.

As Professor Gurumurthy Kalyanaram, the Dean of all the Business Schools of Amrita University puts it, “the striking feature of the University is that ethics is a core theme which runs across all the courses taught here. There is a mandatory course on self-awareness and growth which has yoga, reflection, comparative religion, social giving beyond profits and even a wellness course for the students. All these courses are integrated towards individual growth and social responsibility.”

In order to keep in tune with modern needs, some special courses like Marketing, Financial Modelling, Healthcare, Social Entrepreneurship, Financial Engineering have also been introduced apart from the regular MBA course.

Recognition
Amrita University is recognised by the AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) and has been considered eligible for the prestigious accreditation processes like EQUIS (European Quality Improvement System) in Europe and AACSB (American Association for Certification of Schools of Business) in USA. The entrance exams considered for the business courses are CAT and MAT. For engineering courses, the Amrita School of Engineering has its own entrance exam which is designed by the school faculty.

The University encourages faculty members to publish scholarly research oriented articles. Deepa, an engineering student finds the faculty of the college very knowledgeable and competent to teach the course.

MBA students with a high CAT score in the range of 80 and above get the first opportunity to enter Amrita University. Almost 50-60 per cent of MBA students come from an engineering background. There are about 45-50 students in each class of the MBA course with a total of 100 students for both years. Dual degrees are also on offer.

One is an MBA from Amrita University and the other is the M.Sc in Information Sciences and Management Sciences which is conducted in collaboration with the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. This course gives an opportunity to the students to spend 1-2 months in the US.  Teachers from SUNY conduct six to eight classes in this campus.

A special course in Business Communication has been designed to impart soft-skill training outside the class where group projects and presentations are integral. Work life balance concepts are imparted to students through lectures by prominent persons in the relevant fields. German is offered as an optional language course.

Placement
The Bangalore campus boasts of a placement record of 100 per cent and the average starting salary bracket is Rs 6.1-6.2 lakhs per annum. This year about 55-60 students got jobs in this bracket, while the highest offer was Rs 11 lakhs.

The fee for the MBA courses is Rs 10 lakhs which is inclusive of all expenses like stay, food and course materials. There is an additional Rs one lakh which has to be deposited for the foreign university visit.

The MBA programme is residential and provides adequate hostel facilities for students. Currently, around 1,800 students are residing on campus, of which 480 are girls and 1,420 are boys. The college has a total capacity of 2,300 students which includes both engineering and MBA courses.

The Engineering course of the university includes streams of Electronics, Computer Science, Electronics and Instrumentation, Electrical and Electronics and Mechanical. There are also MTech courses on VLSI, Embedded System, Power Electronics.

Sixteen faculty members and two students from outside have registered for a PhD in this campus. Scholarships are available for undergraduate courses and partial support for PhDs.

The campus of the Business School is under construction and will be completed very shortly. Classrooms for the Business School are run in the under construction area of the campus. The campus has Wi Fi facility for faculty members and high-speed internet facility for students. The library facilities are meant for all the students from both streams of Management and Engineering.

There is a rich collection of course books, reference books, journals, magazines, e-journals, publications where the papers of faculty members are published. The volume of the library is about 28,000.

The canteen facility on campus is also very good. Clean and healthy vegetarian food is served in the canteen. The structure of the canteen is such that it keeps the premises cool.

Extra curricular activities
Students enjoy many extra curricular activities on campus through the six clubs namely, Tungabhadra, Kabini, Cauvery, Netrawati, Sharavati and Krishna. Apart from yoga, physical education and weight-lifting, the college campus also provides facilities for sports like, carom, chess, table tennis, throwball, football, basketball and cricket.

There are other avenues for pursuing one’s interests like the photography club, literary club, cultural events, dance and elocution competitions. There is also a Robotics Club on campus, which organised the FIRA (Federation of International Robot-Soccer Association) soccer event in September 2010.

(FIRA is a non-profit organisation which organises robotic competitions round the globe annually.) This put Amrita, Bangalore on the world map. This enhanced the interest of students greatly and this January an internal robot games competition was also held successfully.