Economic Times Education Summit

 I participated as a speaker on a couple of panels. Overall, it was a nice attempt to bring together thought leaders from government regulators, academic leaders and industry participants. IBM and Google were two major industry partners, apart from many others. 

I talked about the need to leverage alumni connects, and the need for autonomy, or freedom from excessive regulation of the unnecessary kind in our country. Higher education needs to be free to experiment and innovate with programs, curricula, pedagogy and more. The UGC chairman hinted that these would happen, with the NEP and a new outlook. He also talked about how industry and academia need to support each other. 

Pics from the event. My colleagues Sudhir Pradhan, and Anju Jadon also participated.

Above- One of the panels in which I was a speaker.

Below- another Round Table at the event, moderated by Devina Lason of ET. 

This (below) was the Round Table topic, with industry and academia participating.

Sudhir Pradhan, and Anju Jadon- above.

An ad for the event, on the ET page.

Warm and Fuzzy- New Batch Comes to Town

A warm and fuzzy feeling envelops those that see a new batch of youngsters come in to an academic institute every new year -in academics this happens around June. So it did this week, with a new batch of IMTians entering Nagpur, and seniors returning after summer projects. Mr. Warendra Sinha, MD of GIC Housing Finance, inaugurated the new batch, sharing his views about management education.

This year IDBI Federal gave us a lot of internships, and many students did well in them too. Keeping the tightening job market in view, IMT Nagpur has entered into some new areas such as analytics (where we have tied up with IBM) and some more, like creating new courses or new methods of doing them. One such is built around the Bloomberg terminal which we have installed. Students will get assignments where they use live trading and financial data (global), and that should land them some good jobs as specialists trained in the use of the terminal.

We are also embarking on AACSB accreditation for IMT Nagpur, and this will give us global credibility in a few years.

Apart from an academic orientation in the first week, there are outbound activities that sudents undergo, and a session on Golf at our own IMT Golf Link. Fun way to start on an MBA, I guess. And, this year, there are a few IMT Nagpur alums-turned entrepreneurs who are meeting the new batch with their own stories of starting up.