Think beyond engineering

ALTERNATIVE PATHS

Rohan was not sure what it meant to be an engineer, and whether he should aspire to become one. When he did not get a good rank in the CET, his parents invested a substantial amount and managed to push him into an average engineering college in management quota.

He could not clear some subjects every semester, lost a year, and has finally completed his BE in five years with very average marks. The few companies that came to his college for campus recruitment did not even call him for an interview.

On the other hand Seema was a topper in her school, loved biology, and could have tried for a seat in medical college.  But apprehensive about years and years of study, she opted for what she thought was a good alternative — biotechnology engineering. She managed to get admission on merit in a good college, and maintained consistently good grades. This year many companies visited her prestigious college for campus recruitment, but most were IT companies.

  They were willing to employ Seema and train her in software development since she was a bright student, but she was determined to get a job in her area of core competency.  Finally she could not get a job in either field, and is feeling very lost.

What Rohan and Seema are going through is not uncommon.  Lakhs of engineering graduates who sought out a BE course as a passport to a bright career, are realising that they may have made a mistake.  Added to that is the fact that the biggest employer, the IT industry, is curtailing its intake from last year.

The figures are a little daunting.  Karnataka once had the highest number of engineering colleges in South India — over 150 of them.  Now neighbouring Andhra Pradesh has close to 500, and Tamil Nadu also has more colleges than Karnataka. In 2014 the number of engineering graduates is likely to be 12 lakhs, compared to just 6.5 lakhs a few years ago.  On the other hand, IT companies who were regularly absorbing at least 2 lakh students every year till 2010, are likely to employ less than half that number next year.

The top four IT firms alone used to recruit over a lakh engineers, but this year they may not pick up more than 55,000.  NASSCOM has projected IT growth to slow down from 20 per cent to an average of 12 per cent in the current year.  Overall industrial output has fallen to as low as 1.8 per cent in 2012.

First choice

Despite these stark and real figures, engineering continues to be the No. 1 choice of students (and of course their parents) among tens of lakhs of students all over the country.  The number of students preparing for IIT-JEE is increasing to over five lakhs, for less than 10,000 seats.

Students are put through IIT-JEE coaching from Class VIII onwards. Parents are choosing schools and colleges for their wards based on whether they offer engineering admission coaching or not.  Even mediocre students, whose chances of getting a seat in IIT are almost nil, are made to go through the rigours of extensive coaching for entrance exams.

Another dangerous fallout of the coaching is that the student is only indoctrinated into the methodology of cracking the entrance exams.  Many coaching centres do not even pretend to impart knowledge or sharpen skills of their students, they are only interested in statistics of how many candidates they could push to somehow make it into a prestigious engineering institute.

And here again the real statistics show a very grim picture — only a miniscule number of the innumerable candidates who pay huge amounts to coaching centres actually make it to their dream course.

This craze for engineering as a passport to success entices many who are hardly oriented towards, or interested in, technology as a career. The intelligent ones use their engineering degree to move into management, administration, or even totally unrelated careers like design, mass communication, banking, or politics.  Since entrance exams for admission to prestigious B-schools such as IIM’s is through the highly quantitative and analytical oriented tests like CAT, MAT etc, we find IIM’s swarming with engineers — thus reinforcing to students that engineering is the only path to a successful managerial career.

On the other hand, we come across lakhs of students who invest their time, money and energy plodding through BE in mediocre colleges that do not have competent faculty, proper infrastructure, or even the drive and motivation among their managements to produce better graduates.

These students are left high-and-dry with shattered dreams, unwilling to take up jobs in small organisations on low salary, and are ignored by the MNC’s. The only outlets for some of them are the BPO’s, which attract them primarily because of their brand name, quick recruitment, impressive offices, and vague promises of future promotions.  Not many actually go up the ladder, and when monotony sets in, they quit in frustration, back to the job search and confusion about what direction to take.

Other options

Not many students or parents are even aware that there are equally promising and challenging professional courses that can be alternatives to engineering.  Some of the prominent ones are: Law (particularly in the National Law Schools), Design, Hotel Management, Paramedical courses, Agricultural Sciences, Architecture, Pure Sciences, Liberal Arts, etc.  If the intention is to acquire a good foundation through a professional course, rather than taking up a basic three-year degree, then the choice now is very wide and in many cases, equally rewarding.

Similarly, most students are not even aware of the choices available in engineering. Very few know that in Karnataka through CET alone there is a choice among almost 30 different branches of engineering.  The mad rush for computer science and electronics is very short-sighted, as the students do not seem to have a vision to look forward to approximately 50 years that they will be in their career, and go only by which branches have the best “scope” as of now.

In the coming years campus recruitment will be a thing of the past, since recruitment will be done on-line and it will not matter which college the student is from.  With globalisation, one can look for employment anywhere in the world, and in many cases, without moving out of their homes. The future is very bright — Indian students will be competing and succeeding internationally — but the most lucrative careers will be for those who chose their field based on a judicious mixture of interest, aptitude and suitability, not through a herd mentality.

Here is a list of some professional courses available at the under-graduate level:
Agriculture, Architecture, Bio-informatics, Biotechnology, Chartered Accountancy, Civil Aviation, Company Secretary, Cost Accountancy, Economics, Environmental Sciences, Fashion Design, Film making, Foreign languages, Forestry, Hotel Management, Journalism, Law, Liberal Arts, Life Sciences, Mass communication, Multimedia/ graphics, Nutrition, Pure sciences, Social Sciences, Social Work, Special Education, Travel & tourism, Veterinary, Medicine — allopathy, ayurveda, dental, homeopathy, unani, siddha, naturopathy, Paramedical sciences — optometry, speech language pathology, nursing, pharmacy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, optometry, radiography, renal dialysis, to name a few.