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Context:
Applies to majority of the affiliated colleges under Anna University, Chennai. Being graduated in one such affiliated (formarly IRTT Erode, now GCE Erode) college made me to retrospectively analyze what did I study in my bachelor degree and how much is really useful to my day-to-day life.
Return of Investment:
I have spent four years to obtain bachelor degree in Electrical and Electronics, now working as Software Engineer mainly living on C++ and Java. I didn't get much of the knowledge from my bachelor degree, where I supposed to learn the required stuff. May be it is my fault that I didn't grasp the lessons. Also I can't claim myself as a confident Electrical Engineer. To sum up, I have spent 4 years to stay in some place, spending time and money, learning (trying to learn) something, but failing to gather the required stuff!
I'm not even using 15% of the stuff I have learned in my bachelor degree. No one would call it as a good investment, if 85% of the invested source is wasted. As mentioned in the "The Lean Startup" book, it is a real Engineering Waste.
What Can Be Done?
Changing the whole education system doesn't happen over night. At the same time we don't have to tie our hands and wait for the change to happen. Taking a small step and continues improvement will make dramatic changes over time. I sum up such small things here that can be implemented right away without disturbing the system.
1. Observation Note:
I'm clueless why such note exist in the modern world? May be in the stone age, the students are expected to make mistakes during experiments and record many values, and the end of the day only the correct value gets into the Record note. Perhaps it made sense back then. It is a punishment in 21st century. I'd call it a curse if a Computer Science student writing program by hand in the observation note!
Suggestion:
For computer science students, every line of code must be in git! Record note must be auto generated from source code with a help of available tools such as Doxygen. It would be more beneficial for student to spend time automate such stuff rather than doing mundane work of writing observation and record note. As a side benefit, the code in git can be shown to anyone at anytime, it can be listed in the resume and so on.
The same strategy is also applicable for other branch students. There is almost no engineering field where computer is not involved. If any intermediate results are to be recorded, use your private note or a scrap paper.
NO OBSERVATION NOTE! DIRECTLY WRITE RECORD NOTE!
2. Project Report:
We were expected to make three hard copies of our bachelor thesis. One copy was given to the college library, second one to the department library and the third one is for our personal use. I'm 100% percent sure that the copies given to both the libraries were never used again. It simply gathered dust until one fine day they were disposed or sold as scrap paper.
Suggestion:
Students must give their bachelor thesis in pdf form with searchable text. College library or the dept library shall have all the collection of the thesis (although no one will ever look back). Only in special cases, the Head of the Dept shall ask hard copies from max three projects per year.
Advantages: Library remains clean. All the bachelor thesis are accessible, searchable anywhere anytime. Less paper is always environmental friendly.
Last updated: 18-Sep-2022, 22:05 CET
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