Taking holidays seriously

CAREER PATH

However, some students think differently. They are well aware of the importance of career and market-oriented additional courses which provide them hands-on experience in their respective fields. So they consider semester holidays as the best time to join pre-placement training, technical and soft-skill programmes offered by their institutions.

Most of these courses also continue much after the holidays and after the end of the course, the students will be equipped with additional knowledge about his or her field.

However, apart from these programmes, most of which are recommended by the universities, different colleges have also taken up initiatives to include some unique courses in the interest of students.

“Such courses really help us in many ways. But the thing is I don’t want to waste my holidays in the classroom. I will register myself for such courses if they are offered during college hours,” says Nishmita from Jain University. But students like Umar, an MBA student of City College, does not mind spending his holidays for gaining extra knowledge.

“As a management student, at the end of the course, I should be competent enough to face the real world challenges. If attending a course will help me in polishing my managerial, communication, crisis-solving skills, why should I miss the opportunity?” he asks.

And in his college, a good number of Computer Science students have been attending an add-on course during the holidays.

PES and BNM Institutions also have some short-term courses meant for their students. In BNMIT after the fifth semester, each student has to attend a pre-placement training programme for a month. This is mandatory for all the students regardless of their aggregate marks.

“In our college, we have IEEE and ISTE chapters arranging many useful courses during vacations. And this year, around 15 students from our college are going to IIT-Chennai to attend a course in digital signal processing. The duration of this course is 20 days and it will eat up the holidays. But, none of us are worried about losing holidays as we have a lot of fun-filled activities on campus,’’ says Prathyay, one of the students.