Following are my very personal views on quality of education at IITs. So please don’t create flames.
If you feel the same or otherwise, I will be glad to hear from you and learn from your experiences. This discussion was trigerred by my friend Prajit, and I am providing the whole conversation without any edits (I have not removed typos or grammatical errors), to capture the conversation’s real tone.
Prajit Wrote:
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Dear Shalin
Yesterday I was going through the website of NUS…
I found something interesting…
University Ranking of 2005……….
In the university ranking IISC was missing.. but in the Technology Institutes category IIT’s were ranked number 3 .. ahead of NUS….
You were in IIT Mumbai… and now in NUS..
What do u feel? Where the difference? Is IIT’s superior to NUS?
Waiting for you reply..
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I wrote:
Dear Prajit,
If you consider undergraduate education, yes… IITs are much-much better than NUS. Because IITs infuse lot of rigour and basic training in their curriculum. NUS undergrads are no match to Indian brain. IIT undergrad would be very good at basics and ready to take on many branches of study, but NUS undergrad would have rather superficial knowledge but will be very well exposed to cutting-edge research areas and technologies.
But when I compare graduate research, I think IITs need to do a lot. If you create a professionalism and research activitiy continuum…. DRDO comes last, IIT ahead them, NUS ahead them, MIT/Stanford etc. first…Research here is very organized and also offers choice to students what they wish to do. It is multidisciplinary and is more oriented towards real-life problems.
Of course, there are exceptions in every system. I know a B.Tech. of IITM who did M.E. in NUS and went back to IISc for PhD. His M.E. experience was not at all good here. For two months he didn’t get anything to work. He was in chemistry deptt.
If I consider my case, I feel I am at the best place possible for me. I am supposed to do two state-of-the-art experiments in two labs in different areas over one year.. then I should select my research problem. Even in IISc, I would not get such an opportunity of really trying out two areas. So it is my scholarship and programme that are putting me in good position, but the IITM guy was just unfortunate to land up at the wrong place!!!
One of the guy has joined PhD in NUS after doing Master’s in Fraunhofer, Germany. He just hated Europe because of its weather, language problem and social culture. But he was OK with research rigour and facilities there. So he opted for Singapore.
Singapore is much close to our Indian culture and on top of that it is a developed country offering peaceful life.
So it seems that the right place for us is the place where we see opportunities for our professional and personal goal.
And rankings are biased by parameters that they use. And your parameters may not be the same as ranking parameters. Over time, I have felt that Ranking is the place to find the universities that may be of interest to you. For PhD, rankings dont matter at all… it is all about getting a good deal. In highly ranked uni.. there are higher chances of getting good deal, but that is all… there is only a chance, no surity…
