Learning Lessons

Came across this link on the lessons of an MIT education.

A few of the lessons, especially Lesson 6, really made me think. Personally, I feel that I might have made a mistake. After completing my high school, I got a place in a very prestigious college but not in an engineering course - but an allied engineering course. But not being comfortable getting a degree in an allied engineering course, I switched to a very new college but an Engineering course. I'm still not very certain that this had been a definitive advantage/ disadvantage over the years. But like what Dr. Rota states, an education at a more competitive centre would certainly boost the confidence as well as would help us measure to a high performance. At times during my undergraduate course, I have felt that the faculty or the research level was not upto what the student needed at that time. But, well, you go into an institution in India - you have to come out of it - there is no easy way to transfer and move to be a better institution during the course of education.

Being at a well established educational institution gives a lot of opportunities to the students as well as the faculty. Being a centre of excellence, better performers congregate and this leads to higher levels of education, research and learning. Having more better minds, gives opportunity to explore more new fields, more intersecting/ overlapping arenas, etc. Better industry collaboration would be definitely on the cards.

Seeing this article, still makes me wonder how many of the institutions in India measure upto this level. IITs and IISc are a very few. But even at IITs I have been told that "Undergraduates are the products of IIT, Graduates the by-products and Ph.Ds the waste products" - I'm not trying to be critical - but how many great doctoral dissertations have we got from IITs? - how many break through technologies have we seen from students in research at IITs? - I still wonder if we have the numbers to compare with other well known institutions world wide.

Hope that India puts her best foot forward to tune up the level of education at the educational institutions so that one day, we would still be able to write an article on "Lessons from an Indian Education".