Indian Education System

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 29 Dec 2014 00:27

ArmenT wrote:
matrimc wrote: ."Soul of a new machine" by Tracy Kidder. I did meet one of the people in the book.
.. Which person did you meet, just curious? Surely not the engineer who famously declared "I've given up and joined a commune and will not deal with any unit of time smaller than one season!" (I'm paraphrasing from memory here).

Tom West? skunkworks? he is no more per wiki.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 29 Dec 2014 00:37

Theo_Fidel wrote:^^^^
I wish it were that simple.

The truth is even the west is not sure what the source of innovation is or where it will come from or the nature of education required for the future. No one is certain about the future...

I'd not think so.. it is all clear past and present information available on the nature of the country formation itself. people flocked to massa needs either one of the two qualifications -

- has money and can become an entrepreneur
- has brains and solid education to back it

rest is hard work, focused for usable systems and processes.
the country stands behind standardization, that is policy driven. has clean picture about the economic model, where they put education and society behind innovations and new products. for example, if apple announces a new version, there are zillions who would say yes before it goes to drawing board. brand equity created, and markets established. society prepped for the standardized living where the consumer market can be zoned pretty much easy.. larger the mass of standardized and networked mindsets, easier to zone them into one data group to deliver products and services.

India's case! where is the capacity? what standardization? implementation screw up? corruption? yadi yada.. it is a big network of problem and not just edu.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 00:50

ArmenT: It was Steve Wallach. Met him at Brooklyn Poly which was his UG alma mater where I was doing a masters in CS. He came there a six months after the release of C2. Not the person (did anybody see him?) who left the note with the quote you mentioned one morning and was never seen again. He went and joined a commune or some such thing was the (urban) legend at that time.

The C2 was a crossbar-interconnected multiprocessor version of the C1, with up to four CPUs, released in 1988. It used newer 20,000-gate CMOS and 10,000-gate emitter-coupled logic (ECL) gate arrays for a boost in clock speed from 10 MHz to 25 MHz, and rated at 50 MFLOPS peak for double precision per CPU (100 MFLOPS peak for single precision). It was Convex's most successful product.

He mentioned that they lot of IBM MF customers are moving to their machines because IBM's MF OS OS/MVS at that time could have only a certain number of 16 MB partitions of VM memory where as C2 could go many more. While the lecture was going on, one of his assistants handed him a note. After reading that he had a big smile on his face. He said IBM had press conference just now where they said they would release a machine with similar capability as C2 in 12-18 months. Please look up wiki entry on Convex. interesting tid-bits. My advisor told me just before I finished my PhD (at a different place) that I had a job at Convex if I wanted it. But we went some other route - myself and my advisor.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 01:25

What Theo says is correct. Once during my PhD, I remember talking to a ABC professor. He was asking "How come Indians have so much creativity? Not much is seen in the chinese". Even today all the Chinese people I work with say the same. That said, IMHO, we tend to be a little over-confident and bindas types because we can understand English (which is unarguably lingua franca of the world) almost at the same level of our native tongues which is not true with most people who come to US as grad students (excepting of course UK, Ireland, Au, Canada). Obviously almost all higher studies require ability to understand complex thought processes which cannot be gotten into any depth in a 15 minute conference presentation or in 5 page paper in conference proceedings. Conferences are where the latest research is presented so it is very important to understand what the researcher is talking right then and there plus during lunches and birds of feather get together or professors and students meet over a few beers. Journal papers come months if not years later. Even in those papers, all the details are not presented due to limits on number of pages.

Anecdotally, once we were writing a paper where myself and colleague had a couple paras describing something we thought was a missing step. Advisor takes a eliminate those two paras. It is a well known fact. Before we started the research for the paper, it was neither known to me nor my colleague who was a post-doc. My colleague says "Prof. <my advisors firstname>. You are cruel" and my advisor had a smirk on his face. Years later, when I was reading a book on second year UG calculus to refresh my memory, I found that it indeed is a well known fact. Of course, pure mathematicians or classically educated engineers (advisor was an IIT undergrad) would not miss those kinds of things.

A few things I learnt over my career as a researcher (now independent) is that

1. Memory is very important component of intelligence
2. No knowledge goes waste
3. Innovation and creativity take one only so far. Killer instinct and copious amounts of sweat and blood is required to realize (implement) the ideas to solve real life practical problems. There are lots of traps, blind alleys, sirens, monsters etc. on the road that starts from innovation to physical realization.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 29 Dec 2014 02:17

great post math guru.. if that is your real name, i only need very few iteration to know your actual first name. Unless you don't wish to hide, you may please edit.

your last line sums up pretty much the experience.. that comes only by working thru it!

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 03:06

Persi Diaconis Mathematician
He dropped out of school at 14 and on the road for 7-8 years, came back to UG and then went on to become a Havard Professor and one of the founding Fellows of AMS.

Biography
Diaconis left home at 14[10] to travel with sleight-of-hand legend Dai Vernon, and dropped out of high school, promising himself that he would return one day so that he could learn all of the math necessary to read William Feller's famous two-volume treatise on probability theory, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications. He returned to school (City College of New York for his undergraduate work graduating in 1971 and then a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics from Harvard University in 1974), learned to read Feller, and became a mathematical probabilist.[11]

According to Martin Gardner, at school Diaconis supported himself by playing poker on ships between New York and South America. Gardner recalls that Diaconis had "fantastic second deal and bottom deal".[12]

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 03:10

SaiK: suitably edited. no, that was not my first name but my advisor's profession P stands for Professor. May be we should have Education forum in GDF where we can talk more freely.

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 03:19

csaurabh wrote:As for the BPL Indians thing this is the same question as to why India can have a space program yet not solve poverty. The world does not work that way.

You are being binary maximalist. My point is exactly the opposite. If somebody is good at something which can change the lives of people at large scale, why get a jhola and start doing social work? There is nothing wrong in doing that but people have to push what they are good at to the limit. The world can support only so many social workers and doctors/engineers without borders. The obverse point is that is that the world can support only so many computer (or whatever) scientists, Ravi Shankars, and Raja Ravi Varmas.

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 29 Dec 2014 03:46

Matrimc,

Good post saar. We need more specialists in India. The bane of India is generalists.... ...useful at everything, good at nothing....

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 05:02

Theo saar: The key is the correct level of generalization (or specialization). For example, there is only one subject GRE for all engineering bachelors. Lots of Indian students do not want to take it. IMHO, it is a correct test to judge competency in engineering - just only as a cross check of course. All engineering branches are connected. Given a SPICE solver, EEs can solve circuit problems. But then MEs can solve dashpot-spring-mass problems equally well. The first objection is that "VLSI has millions and approcahing a couple of billion components. Where is the need for that in ME? I can solve using pencil/paper". What about MEMS which are finding increasing number of areas in which they can be used profitably (not to be confused with fiscal profitability).

(going by your other posts elsewhere) I am sure you would understand if I say that one can understand electrostatics by understanding heat equation and vice versa. The underlying mathematics - O/PDEs - are same. Of course, units are different. But what of it if the problem solvers - human or computer - can account for the differences and can convert from one language to the other on the fly? At an abstract level (caveat being the level of abstraction is not too high so as to actually take the problem out of engineering domain) they are essentially the same problem. If you (the generic you) dig deeper, large parts of the underlying physic, expressed in mathematical language - calculus, are similar if not the same. Specialization comes in the form of understanding not only how they are different but what the essential differences are and the ways in which they can be used for engineering new devices/gadgets/thingummys that make life simpler.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 29 Dec 2014 07:17

iow, the specialists should push changes to generalists on a periodic basis as it keeps the generalizations at the right specialization.

gakakkad · Post by **gakakkad** » 29 Dec 2014 20:36

>>one can understand electrostatics by understanding heat equation and vice versa. The underlying mathematics - O/PDEs - are same. Of course, units are different. But what of it if the problem solvers - human or computer - can account for the differences and can convert from one language to the other on the fly? At an abstract level (caveat being the level of abstraction is not too high so as to actually take the problem out of engineering domain) they are essentially the same problem. If you (the generic you) dig deeper, large parts of the underlying physic, expressed in mathematical language - calculus, are similar if not the same. Specialization comes in the form of understanding not only how they are different but what the essential differences are and the ways in which they can be used for engineering new devices/gadgets/thingummys that make life simpler.

you talk like Steven wolfram .

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 29 Dec 2014 22:38

I think he is quite good, especially his cellular automata theory. Not necessarily Mathematica though due the language being non orthogonal. No, I don't work for Mathematica just in case people are wondering

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 29 Dec 2014 23:37

gakakkad wrote:you talk like Steven wolfram .

He may be Steven Wolfram...

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 29 Dec 2014 23:46

matrimc wrote:I think he is quite good, especially his cellular automata theory. Not necessarily Mathematica though due the language being non orthogonal. No, I don't work for Mathematica just in case people are wondering

His cellular automata problems and their solutions are amazing. Gerard T'Hooft used some of the results from Wolfram to try and see if QM and GR can be combined into one large cellular automata (since speed of cellular automata progress is like speed of light, nothing inside the cellular automata can break it

). I think that is the best chance theory waiting for someone like Einstein to come along and finish up tying the loose ends.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 30 Dec 2014 00:09

mathguru, have you read "new kind of science"? very cryptic but you should do that in a jiffy!

gakakkad · Post by **gakakkad** » 30 Dec 2014 20:23

SaiK wrote:mathguru, have you read "new kind of science"? very cryptic but you should do that in a jiffy!

nice book.. [OT] IMHO Wolfram is an underated guy... If you look at the powerful stuff Wolfram language and wolfram alpha can do ,it is phenomenal...I mean one can type all sorts of things into it... like gdp of India / GDP of brazil ...it ll even come up with a graph... Type list of countries asia shape , and see the magic...triple integration , partial differential equations written as plain text,it ll solve it , eigen values what not ...the Language engine is phenomenal ... it is way more brilliant than g chacha ..and he used lesser resources...[/OT]

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 31 Dec 2014 00:31

http://www.datasciencecentral.com/forum ... erspective
The downfall of the “Modern Education System” – A brief perspective!

Education today – Matter of importance or a Business game.
Numerous institutions, several courses, 100s of curriculum still many of us struggle for jobs, compromise with our careers, do things that we don’t really ever wanted to do & drag a life. Education providers are pure businessmen these days, they are all about money, revenue & profits. Over promising & under delivering, no selection criteria just filling in seats. I don’t even need to talk about it, I am sure at one point of time whether it was for yourself, your siblings, your kids or anyone else, you have expected & have been disappointed with the education system you particularly chose after a lot of research consultation & study.
Education has become expensive, obsolete & unrealistic.
There used to be times when all students had to do was study, really really hard to get one of those 30 seats at a reputed institute. When individuals strived hard to cram their books just for that one scholarship. Today the scenario is different, we mortgage, borrow, lease & do all kind of financial compromises just to get our kids into a good institution (which by the way printed on its brochure that seats were limited but there were 300 students in the same batch). No one can measure the pain & disappointment of a middle class kid who sees another child having 5 backlogs in his school graduation exams & still getting into the same institution right next to them, but that kid won’t complain because of the fact that his guardian already mortgaged the house they lived in to be able to afford the tuition fee for the institution. Later in life this kid struggles silently carrying the burden of the responsibilities life has put onto him & forging a career into a future-less black hole of uncertainties. Who to blame? The student & his family for not making the right choice or the knowledge imparting body that apparently only counts a student as a customer account for the duration the students spends at their facility. Math takes five back steps when we talk about counting the number of institutions that exist & the ones that are opening all fresh.
Everyone wants a job no one cares about knowledge or qualifications.
Not only institutions but individuals contribute a lot more to it. The confidence amongst people, the self-belief of being able to fulfill own aspirations is flickering like the flame of a candle in rain. Everyone is running to win but unaware of the track they want to follow. We search for institutions who promise us a job even before we analyze our own capabilities or desires, or before we judge what we are good at.
This practice is not only killing the immense possibilities that wait in for us in future but also tie us, confined us to a net we weave ourselves. The worst part is, we realize this when it’s always too late & then we’re not left with many choices, so we pick up a topic & blame the institution we chose & curse it.
Value of what is taught is less, how much you spend to learn is more.
Truly the era of show biz that we have entered has impacted our entire human system. Just like we’re worried about what we are going to wear for the weekend party & what other people will think of us, we worry about which higher education program we should opt. Who gives a damn you scored 99% on your calculus exam the spotlight is on the average scoring kid whose dad sent him to that international university & it cost him a fortune. Exceptions excluded but that international guy will sure have an advantage & a labelled head start with the amount of money he spent on education written all over it in a job interview that both might take in future.
Academic competition is dying in front of advertisement structure.
No one cares what you do, the whole agenda revolves around what you say you can do.
Advertisement is a great tool & it has proven its worth to a fair extent in past few decades. But a matter as imperative as education, is it really fair to judge its authenticity with advertisement. I for one (despite of being from the advertising industry) think it shouldn't be. Now this should not be mistaken with spreading the word. Letting people know what you offer with highlighting its prospects in future is entirely different from creating a hoax & luring individuals into a web by making false promises.
Categorizing students is important categorizing institutions needs priority.
Education providers have a right to pick their students on what criteria they find is suitable. But we seem to have given them the power of making us believe that we are the chosen ones when in real we are just a part of their money making herd. No one can help in this, only we as individuals need to categorize & save ourselves from these so called self-proclaiming advanced institutions & choose what’s right by doing enough research & keeping our patience in hands. A stitch in time saves nine but why rely on stitches for the rest of our lives when spending a few more time units can actually help us judge & choose better. Makes sense? Don’t hurry, invest time & choose wisely.
Why educational marketing should be well thought over before implementation?
I am so glad that I work for an organization that has a prime goal of doing something different & with a focus of adding value to its associates in terms of education. Not just reeling in money.
Education is sought after, but it’s not a product that can be sold like a shampoo bottle. (We all know our hair won’t become like Julia Roberts like in those ads). Then why should we believe what salary we’d have in our first job even before we got into college. It is serious stuff. What it all comes down to is that education is no joking matter, marketers should not put their activities to an end but the hoaxes, fake promises, false claims & exaggerated know how, should be put to rest. This is an individual’s future & life, on a bigger frame isn't it individuals who form a country & the entire world.
An apology from “The kid in a professional suit on the college prospectus you are taking admission in without thinking”
“I was a part of that bright prospectus print used to lure you into this fancy education system & I curse myself I didn't say no to the fake propaganda & did not hold my fake smile back”

Amber G. · Post by **Amber G.** » 31 Dec 2014 04:25

I think this will be of interest.

Some may already know this, but if you are or you know someone who is in High School and is
exceptionally bright and interested in Math, Physics (or other science / engineering etc) this is the
time to apply for RSI (Research Science Institute)

The Research Science Institute (RSI) is a highly competitive summer research program for rising high school seniors around the world (For US or India citizens). RSI is sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Education (CEE) and hosted by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

(I will be involved in mentoring a person this year - so if you know someone encourage him/her to apply )

For details please see: http://www.cee.org/apply-rsi

It will take place beginning June 21st through August 1st..last date to apply is Jan 16.

Yes, one has to be really good (for whom acing JEE is easy

) to get accepted, but if one is selected, financially it will not cost you. You will be among the best of students (around 50 US and 30 from outside US), with world-class teachers (including Nobel-prize winners)

(For perspective, in US the recommendation is not to apply if PSAT math scores is less than 76(out of 80), and combined math, critical reading, and writing PSAT scores is less than 220 (out of 240) unless it is offset by strong recommendation or gold medal in IMO or such thing..)

For more detail, see the link given before.

***

This is also the time to look at Math (or physics/biology etc) Olympiad trials.. everyone is welcome.
(If your school (in US or India) is not familiar, ask them to check out AMC (or equivalent India site)
(http://www.maa.org/math-competitions
or http://olympiads.hbcse.tifr.res.in/subjects/mathematics
A sample paper from Bengal http://www.isical.ac.in/~rmo/questions_3.pdf

and see how your school's student can participate. First selection trials is some time in February (where any high school (or younger) student can theoretically take part). Top 1% from here will be invited for the next level, and again top 1% from the next level will be invited to take part in national Olympics - from which top 20-30 people will be able to join to national coaching camp and about 6 people will be selected for your national team)

***

I mention it here, that many, even good schools and teachers, are not aware of these programs.

***

Of course, there are other less competitive, but excellent programs for good students. Regular applications for UG is done around this time too. Some of the top universities in US (eg MIT, Duke, Caltech) take a few exceptional international students (and of course US citizens too). Some have good Merit scholarships but virtually for all the criteria for admission does NOT involve financial factor of the student. (IOW, if you get admitted, the university makes sure that you will be able to afford the cost - again something many people do not know)...For good Math students - Duke's math program is good (and in my view an alternative to go to IIT's if your primary focus is pure science)

gakakkad · Post by **gakakkad** » 31 Dec 2014 17:26

@ Amber G , one of problems with IMO is that it involves a lot of number theory which is not really taught in Indian schools...in fact not all that important for jee too..IMO does not have calculus which our kids are good at..out of curiosity , why does not IMO have calculus ?

csaurabh · Post by **csaurabh** » 01 Jan 2015 20:01

Nice article. Posting in full

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-indian ... to-fix-it/

It is extremely strange that a country that has produced an avalanche of engineers, many of whom have gone on to start some of the leading tech companies in the world, are CEOs of various multinationals, are heads of M&A divisions on Wall Street and have taken over many of the world's consulting firms can be accused of coming from an educational system that is fundamentally unsound.

And yet, that seems to be the case. A few years ago, the Economist highlighted a study done by Indian firm Aspiring Minds on a large number of Indian engineering graduates. The firm is run by brothers Himanshu and Varun Aggarwal who had previously collectively received engineering degrees from the temples of global engineering (the Indian Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

What the brothers unearthed was shocking at first, but perhaps not so surprising when you actually think about our educational experiences in India. Aspiring Minds essentially concluded that a large number of Indian engineering graduates are unemployable, with 95.8 percent of them not fit to work in a software product firm and only 17.8 percent employable by an IT Services company. These figures were apparently even more bleak than the 25 percent figure of employability presented by McKinsey around ten years ago. (Aspiring Minds' test was similar to the GRE and gauged students' analytical, verbal and quantitative skills). A recent study on current work force skills which I wrote about here pretty much said the same thing.

engineers rote
Indians need to get out of relying on primarily a rote system of education
Many who have navigated the Indian education system as students, even at an elite level, will tell you that one of the evils of our system is the emphasis on rote learning. According to this piece, around 70 percent of Indian principals felt that Indians weren't given enough opportunity to develop creative thinking abilities and that the existing system today was along the lines of the 'factory model' architected in the 18th and 19th centuries in order to feed the engine rooms of the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, rote learning isn't all bad. As this article points out, "Without spellings, facts and rules… you're left floundering in a knowledge-free vacuum," and that "data leads to - proper, considered thought, rooted in knowledge and the logical jumps and inferences that naturally develop from the simple gift of knowing stuff." Indians are comfortable around numbers precisely because things like multiplication tables and assorted formulas were hammered into us at a very early age.

Even today, I know all of Newton's equations for motion. I may have eventually gone on to Trollope and Ginsberg and Amitava Ghosh, but thanks to mind-numbing repetition, I still can’t forget that s=ut+1/2 at^2, where 'a' is negative in the case of a falling body that plummets to earth at 9.8 m/s^2 under the earth's gravitational force. I’m not sure that in my case this would have been possible in the absence of the Indian system of rote. (Or ‘rat-ta’ as we like to call it.)

Off course, if only that were bolstered by a healthy degree of conceptual foundations, I may have enjoyed science instead of eventually analyzing the human condition while stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Instead, today, engineering is simply the means to an end for many Indians rather than an end in itself—and this is doubly dangerous in a cloud-computing, plug-and-play world where engineers are being commoditized and upstaged by vocational students and management graduates.

The inadequacies of the Indian system became apparent to me when I went from a high school (11th grade) in India that was a breeding ground for future IIT engineers and did my 12th grade in a public high school in Queens, New York (my mother was transferred there for work) where I enrolled in the Advanced Placement Calculus class. I had already studied a third of the course work in India but suddenly found a whole universe of practicality opened up to me when I realized, for the first time, that an Integration problem was really about calculating the area under a curvy line that could actually represent a garden or a pathway or a wall and not just some abstract concept that focused on getting the right answer. It was a revelation.

The problem with many of India's engineers (I am told by many who fit that category)—especially those enrolled at India’s best schools like the IITs of the world—is that they focus mainly on getting in. This usually means thousands of hours (and Rupees) spent on ‘tuition’ classes outside of school. Once in, there’s not much intellectual flexing.

The founder of one of India's leading indigenous consulting firms recently told me that he got a rude shock when he arrived in the US for a graduate degree in Management after a supposedly top notch Indian engineering education because he was simply unable, at least in the first few months, to cope with the style of conceptual, analytical thinking that was taking place. "We were all so used to being force-fed for years that when the feeding wasn’t there, we became paralysed," he said.

Indian engineers in the country have it worse because the absence of any liberal arts framework means that elite engineering students often have an elevated impression of themselves but tend to know little of the world around them upon graduation.

But it's not just engineers who find themselves in peril. This article written by an American who spent time at one of India’s elite colleges, St. Stephens, looks at how he found a profound lack of depth amongst the students there. At least engineers have some kind of foundation in Science whereas these 'Commerce' and 'Arts' graduates, on average, tend to have a foundation in, well, nothing. Which is why many Indians who do their undergraduate in India tend to repeat many of these years in the US.

95.8 percent of Indian engineers are unfit to work at Indian software product firms according to Aspiring Minds
What's worse, Indians in general, post-graduation, have a serious lack of knowledge about their own history and culture. This was certainly the case with me when I was in high school. The upper strata of society tend to be the worst off. Having lived in Delhi for the last seven years, I have found that wealthy children from elite urban high schools and privileged boarding schools are in fact the ones that are the most underequipped with critical thinking or sophistication in formulating a world view compared to those coming out of the more ‘average’ institution. Perhaps, the womb of air-conditioned cars that ferry one back and forth and air-conditioned houses to shield you from the elements and half a dozen staff at home, not to mention ski vacations in Switzerland prevent any kind of realistic examination of life around you.

It is not that Indians are not smart. Anything but, people would argue. It is the education system that has failed them. The profusion of successful Indians in the world is despite the odds of a broken system and thanks to the vast population base that allows for attractive numbers. In reality the majority of Indian children, as Pratham, the country's foremost education NGO will tell you have a 2nd grade level of reading and proficiency in the 7th grade and only 1/3rd of students in the fifth grade can do simple division problems.

So, it must come as a tremendous source of relief for those wringing their hands at ruins of the educational system in India to read that social venture capital Lok Capital as well as seedfund Chennai Angels has invested close to US$1 million in Everest Edusys, a company that weans children away from rote learning to learning by doing. It plans on setting up science laboratories in schools across southern states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala where "students learn concepts such as force, motion, gravity through touch and feel and activity based tools," he said.

Everest Edusys’ flagship product Quest Explore Discover (QED) is a mobile interactive exhibit center that teaches students in K-12 science principles in a hands-on way through experiments and other activities.

Apparently Everest has come up with tools that have been used at by over 20,000 children in 100 schools out of which 20 percent are government-run—a category that Everest wants to focus more on in the future by bringing the wonders of a science lab to their doorsteps. The idea is to spur critical thinking at a young age so students by using active learning methodologies. According to research, students using their system enjoyed a 47 percent improvement in their performance. Another outfit Flintbox wants to provide activity boxes on a monthly subscription basis for young children to get their conceptual and creative juices flowing at a young age.

Another innovative enterprise, Skyfi Labs, tries to tackle the problem a little higher up the chain by trying to transform 'textbook geniuses' into employable engineers by giving them something Indians don’t really get often (how many Indians do you know had to slave away at summer jobs or internships?)—such as access to practical, hands-on training, on- and offline.

The outfit has trained over 25,000 students from more than 150 colleges according to VCCircle by conducting two to three day courses in areas such as robotics, aeromodelling, web and mobile app development and civil engineering according. Apparently, a Skyfi Evaluation Engine takes a close look at the performance of each student and then feeds this to companies looking for capable recruits.

A few more of these novel solutions and we just may have a shot at reaching our potential in what could be a deluge of graduate talent in the country. Till then, the rot will continue.

Haresh · Post by **Haresh** » 01 Jan 2015 23:31

csaurabh,

I would pretty much agree with all of that article.
I work in IT and am in the process of moving over to IT Project Management.
The Indian trained engineers and other "graduates" from India really do lack the skills that will allow them to function in a hands on environment.

The one's which have come from wealthy families and attended "elite" schools had a very lofty opinion of themselves and were brought crashing down to earth very quickly. They took the view that they were the brains and everyone else just took the orders and did what they were told to do.

I have met some of these "elite" types in social situations. I don't wish to stereotype, how ever they were useless bugger$. The ones with "Arts" type degrees were totally hopeless, Media & Cultural studies is regarded as an idiots degree in the UK.

I met one chap at a party a few years ago and he was the son of a famous Indian actor. Very well educated, BSc and a PHd in Chemical Engineering from a UK university. He had attended the Lawrence School for Boys and a top notch boarding school in the UK. He was totally obnoxious and offensive. He had never worked in his field of Chemical engineering and was an advertising salesman for some silly little Bollywood mag and a part time insurance salesman. One has to have other skills, especially social skills, as well as the academic qualifications. A complete waste of a dammed good education.

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 02 Jan 2015 01:22

Haresh,

Have you worked with any gora MIT/Stanford grad? You will see a similar elitist attitude. (PhDs are for some reason better, the MS guys are notorious).

Vayutuvan · Post by **Vayutuvan** » 02 Jan 2015 02:20

LokeshC: I have and in my experience I have not found them to be not as arrogant as many IIT people - especially the recent crop. You know MIT/Stanford get challenged too - by their peers as well as the advisers/committees and other researchers who are working in the same area.

On the other hand, people have enormous loyalty to their schools - across the board.

Two examples of people from lower ranked schools actually improving ranks higher ranked schools:

1. D. E. Knuth is from Case Western. Then he went to Caltech and went to Stanford because of whom Stanford CS has become one of the best.
2. Gene Golub from Urbana went to Stanford and set up the CS department.

The new inter-disciplinary research areas are actually upending the traditional pre-eminence of the ivy leagues. Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology have become service departments to train people in basic sciences.

Whenever there was a plateau in Physics research, Physics Researchers somehow always found different areas to latch onto. For example, when the HEP and particle physics is at an ebb, they jumped onto the bandwagon of Chaos and Complexity (not Algorithmic but Complex Systems sense). Electrical Engg. and Physics people jumped into Computer Science (the hardware side to build Computers) when it was a nascent field.

They also have excellent popularizers which is not true with Math nor with CS. By the way, CS is the natural domain of Math researchers which they should have owned. Computational finance jobs are filled by Physicists even though the theory has more to do with Operations Research which is part of math and numerical optimization algorithms which is part of CS. Today, Computational finance is in a mess largely due to the fact that ad-hoc Physics methods are being applied to an area that needs computationally efficient mathematical models. Physics methods are ill-suited to solve the problems of computational finance. Same is true with complex systems with the end result being there were no real advances from Complex Systems researchers other than some weak methods and neural network type hand waving by PDP (Rumelhart and McClellan, Hopfield, and universal cellular automata screen savers).

The latest enlargement of scope of Physicists is Big data, Analytics, Scientific Computing, i.e. areas where there is lot of funding and big projects with hundreds of researchers. Unfortunately - IMHO of course - Physicists' (average joe physicist, not the T'Hooft or Duetch like genius types) understanding of these areas is very poor and consequently they start needing supercomputers to solve even moderate sized problems which can be done on a reasonable desktop if they are cleverer in writing their algorithms. It is easier for CS researcher to learn the required Physics/Chemistry/Biology than an experimental physicist/chemist/biologist to learn the computer programming/Theoretical CS (TCS).

All said and done in the end, experimentalists are users only of computers. When CS was in its infancy (around late 1950s, early 1960s), experimentalists had to invent their own tools and ad-hoc methods. Now that the TCS is well developed, there is no place for ad-hoc methods and tools developed by the experimentalists have no place but for the inertia in the academia which expresses itself in the form of demand for bigger and bigger supercomputers/clusters/clouds (both computational and data storage type).

Essentially nobody but nobody - neither MITs nor CalTechs nor IITs - has a monopoly on any part of human endeavour and it will become more so in coming years. One of their main draws - brand name which translates into brand equity and the ability to charge premium tuitions - will take a beating the likes of which the ivy-leagues haven't seen.

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 02 Jan 2015 03:01

The reason I am frustrated is that I have two goras in my team from Ivy level colleges (one kid is from MIT). He maybe too new to the "industry" but he almost flat out refused to do an assignment I gave him almost jeopardizing the project at that time. We made a mistake in hiring only one person with the required skill set for that job. I am still doing the damage control for the fall out.

Another character is also on the same boat : "I aint doin it if it aint interesting". WTF. Both are MS grads and misphortunately both are goras. Made last year a hell for me.

Added later: Since you are a math guru, I have to add a disclaimer: My sample size is small < 5. The others are much easier to work with and are PhDs. I know I am blatantly generalizing.... but it was *that bad*. I think I might be the problem, i.e. I might be hiring the tough-nuts.

csaurabh · Post by **csaurabh** » 02 Jan 2015 06:59

LokeshC wrote: Hmmm. Actually if there is one thing that I owe to the West, its that I ended up discovering that I was not an "inferior" species to the IITians as I previously believed.

I went to xyz engineering college in India and went to another xyz school of engineering in the US and at the end of that time I had a PhD admit from a "rank 3 university" in my field. Could not take it because of some personal reasons. The funny thing is, my bachelors was completely different from my masters which would have been completely different from my PhD topic (had I taken it up).

In any case, during my time in grad-school and later on my first place of employment I realized that "smartness" was really of limited utility when it comes to real engineering (and I am not being specious here). I say that with all my heart. Being of average intelligence does not prevent you from being an excellent Engineer, vice versa.

Agreed.. I think the real value of IITs is not in what they 'teach' but in the sort of personal connections you can make there..

Intelligence is just another facet of human life like height, muscle power, bank account, social skills, etc. It does not automatically define a person to be superior or inferior. Ultimately it is what you do with that skill that counts. A rocket can launch a satellite into orbit, or it can blow itself up on the launch pad.

Rahul Gandhi is another good example that you can literally be born with a silver spoon in the mouth yet end up becoming a pappu.
Having a 150+ IQ is a very excellent asset when you know what to do with it.

I will also note that most IITians ( or toppers in general ) are temperamentally unsuitable for being "employees". They are much happier off doing their own thing. That is why you'll see so much entrepreneurship, business/management, PHD/academia and just plain weird things ( of my batch one has set up a rock band, one is trying to do organic farming, one is in NM's team, one is in hotel management and so on ). The so called placement news are largely a sham. They do not tell the real picture of what happens 5-10 years down the line.

gakakkad · Post by **gakakkad** » 02 Jan 2015 07:08

>>Intelligence is just another facet of human life like height, muscle power, bank account,

true..and unlike height , bank balance or muscle power there is no reliable scale of measuring intelligence.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 02 Jan 2015 07:57

IITs are moving away from being just a BTech focused institution. There is more going on now than which meets the casual eye and run-ins with a few BTechs that the average joe has seen so far.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 02 Jan 2015 08:44

big-data processing and 3D printing is one area advancing like crazy. The edus need to move with the focus of industrial strength and weaknesses. What they need and how. sometimes, biggie edus engage with larger projects, to create jobs for the courses they offer..kinda backscratch approach at super intelligence level

chaddi walas will turn out papers on the dime only when cash flows in! otherwise, chaddies never goes for a wash.

math guru, that was a nice post! i think, you are moving into singha class brfite, who can begin churning out chapters and books. bade saab has lifted his burkha and going more open now! that is a nice sign.

dsreedhar · Post by **dsreedhar** » 02 Jan 2015 11:51

matrimc, SaiK - Both brought up good points.
In US everything (most parts) is tightly integrated one feeding the other as in a feedback loop and self adjusting. It is a well defined system with the policies supporting and facilitating these systems and structures.
In general the breadth and depth covered in the Indian education system in different stages is pretty good and apt...IMO. It lays a sound foundation of knowledge and learning and the ability to do most of the regular day to day jobs. The content just needs to keep up with the changing times and be upto date.
I consider myself of avg intelligence. Since childhood as long as I remember, my approach has been to always understand the subject. But I also had to memorize to ace in the tests to be in good ranking. My memorizing capacity sucked. I had to do multiple iterations to memorize. With the amount of the content it took lots of time. It took away time from further understanding and exploring of the subject. Know couple of friends in high school who had an amazing memorizing capacity that they memorized the entire text book.
Memory is also important. And has its place. Just that it should not be at the expense of subject understanding. In some fields/jobs it may take more prominence.
We want to have an education system that promotes more creative and analytic abilities that lend to more innovation. However not everyone has the same level of creative minds and also we do not need and can not have all innovators. So, with that, the question is do we have one education system for all? Or do we have some sort of a separate system for the creative minds with extra ordinary abilities. I have met a few people in my schooling life that were super intelligent. They were way ahead of the class and did not fit in. It was just an under use of their time.

Anyways we need to make some amends to reduce the blind memorizing in our schools. The change need to be sustained and reinforced.

A few factors that came to my mind that may be impacting the creative thinking and innovation potential -
Evaluation system - There is too much stress on written tests and result numbers. Everyone trying to reach the perfect score of 100. Introduce something similar to research/case study and presentation in addition to the written test. Introduce the grade system (distinction, A..F).
Language - Is this a factor? I have seen people coming from schools where medium of instruction being local language and struggling to cope up with english in higher studies especially in science fields.
Social norms - Is this any factor? There is societal pressure to get married and have family. This mostly affects the girls and to some extent guys which can easily be 70% of the educated. In such situation there may not be much inclination/time to enhanced learning and high level research. Just some basic education and a regular job is the goal.
Reward - What is the level of compensation for the innovators? Do the industry pay sufficiently to attract the scientists and researchers?

dsreedhar · Post by **dsreedhar** » 02 Jan 2015 12:04

Coming to advancing technologies I think there is medical revolution in immunology and regenerative medicine. Those are two fast growing areas - immunotherapy, gene and stem cell therapies.
Don't know how much of research is contributed in these areas from India. As these are relatively new and growing technologies India should get into it and not lag behind trying to do catch up down the years. We need affordable medicine.

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 02 Jan 2015 13:51

3D printing is going to be BIG, like.... unimaginably big. I have an intern who worked in a project that was attempting to do 3D printing of live cell complexes. You could get your liver 3D printed out soon, all they would need is a stemcell.

dsreedhar · Post by **dsreedhar** » 02 Jan 2015 20:52

Yes 3D printing is also going big. Good time for India for the Make in India campaign for manufacturing. Just as in communication that India jumped directly into cell phone revolution, in manufacturing it may jump into the 3D manufacturing. It is basically additive manufacturing. Interesting to see what its limitations would be and to what extent it may be used in all manufacturing and be cost effective.
It is introduced in organ printing and first one being liver. The first main application is liver to assist in the pharmaceutical testing toxicity. That itself a big plus for pharma industry.

Theo_Fidel · Post by **Theo_Fidel** » 03 Jan 2015 00:21

dsreedhar wrote:It is basically additive manufacturing.

This is the next leap forward in manufacturing. Keep your eye on it....

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 03 Jan 2015 00:27

And with it will come the collapse of China. i.e. India must invest heavily into it.

dsreedhar · Post by **dsreedhar** » 03 Jan 2015 00:32

I would not underestimate China. It got enough money and time to make the transition.

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 03 Jan 2015 00:36

It will make the transition. But 3D printing is all about 100% automation, the part comes out fully assembled. That removes the need for human labor, and that removes the need to outsource it. Unless Chinese economy is internally self-sustaining they will not take in well the loss of business and livelihood due the transition of manufacturing back to the US and the West.

India is in a much better place due to the fact that much of our economy is internally self-sustaining. if you ask me we are uniquely positioned to use 3D manufacturing to leap frog into the next gen and build a very robust economical model on top of it.

SaiK · Post by **SaiK** » 03 Jan 2015 00:58

LokeshC wrote:And with it will come the collapse of China. i.e. India must invest heavily into it.

dsreedhar wrote:I would not underestimate China. It got enough money and time to make the transition.

funny! do you all know who has got the world's largest 3D printers?

man! you guys are talking to some system that believes and trusts and lives by the right to copy!

member_22733 · Post by **member_22733** » 03 Jan 2015 01:11

SaiK saaaar. I completely get what you and drsreedhar saar are saying. My point is, 3D printers will cut out mass employment. Mass employment and its growth is what keeps china growing.

Chinese economy will still grow, but the growth will be in the pockets of the super rich and the members of CPRC politburo. At this point the masses are happy that they are employed and they see a betterment in their quality of life. 3D printing will change that equation.

Bade · Post by **Bade** » 03 Jan 2015 01:16

Who will provide for the mass employment needed in India...it is not like we are a 100 million only in population country...Every time I visit India I see the masses and see no hope for them to improve their living standards. With all this automation that is on the horizon, I am more and more convinced that a population culling is imminent...by natural selection if not by choice.