IIT-M alumni to play agony aunt

The institute will be celebrating its annual Alumni Day on July 31, also the reunion day for IIT-M’s 1970 batch that includes Union Home Secretary G K Pillai, former Union Petroleum Secretary M S Srinivasan and former chief of the Karnataka police R Sri Kumar.

The IIT-MAA’s ‘Mentoring Programme’ was initially designed for the alumni to mentor students in career development opportunities, but the initiative had evolved into newer and dynamic forms, R Nagarajan, Advisor, IIT-M’s Office of Alumni Affairs, said on Thursday.

The alumni could help in solving inter personal crisis of the students and thus avoid recurrence of cases of suicides that was reported from the campus in the last couple of years, Nagarajan said. “As the ego levels of IIT students are quite high due to their sense of achievement, they would rather have one of their alumni counselling them,” he said.

“There have also been some interesting cases of our senior alumni wanting to be mentored by our junior alumni especially when the members of the former group want to leave senior managerial jobs to try their hand in entrepreneurship,” Nagarajan said.

Referring to the ‘Golden Jubilee Alumni Fund’ launched last year during IIT-M’s 50th year celebrations, Nagarajan said the institute was looking at various options to increase the alumni’s contributions to infrastructure development in the campus, travel grants for students to present papers in other universities within India and abroad, and for scholarships.

There is a pressing need to improve infrastructure in the campus, as there has been a 50 per cent increase in the institute’s intake following implementation of 27 per cent OBC reservation in admissions. The IIT-M has prepared a huge five-year master plan exceeding Rs 200 cores to add to buildings and other amenities in the campus. The alumni could contribute towards this, he noted.