On his recent trip to India, one of the founders of Apple, Steve Wozniak, who was the engineer behind the first ever Apple computer, said that India will not be able to create breakthrough companies like Google of Facebook in the near future. His diagnosis was despondent: Indians are not creative.
It’s true that India is home to some of the most successful software companies, like Infosys and TCS. These companies hire thousands of students every year and support major multinational companies by providing them tech solutions. Wozniak might have been a bit unfair to us, but as he says, we don’t see big advances in these tech companies. Our tech companies ride on the wave, don’t create a wave.
And much of the blame, according to Wozniak, is with our academic culture. "The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life,” he says. Indians can work hard, get an MBA, have a Mercedes, but are we creative enough?
Indian tech companies are already losing out because of this, the IT sector is in crisis. Several Western start-ups have zoomed ahead in the past few years with their creative tech solutions, with Indian companies being stuck in the past.
So, what can tomorrow’s engineers do about it? The change must start today, and it starts from choosing the right engineering college.
Lessons from Steve Jobs
We all know Steve Jobs as the man who took Apple to its dizzying heights of success. But there was one crucial reason why his products were great – he learned calligraphy in college.
Calligraphy, which is the visual or art of writing, has very little to do with technology. And yet, Jobs says it was one of the main reasons Apple’s Mac laptops were great.
Here is Steve Jobs’ legendary quote on this.
“I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to [learn calligraphy]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. Historical. Artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I found it fascinating. None of this had any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.”
What Steve Jobs understood was that for engineers to be great at their jobs, they have to learn other things in the world. And that is why you have to choose an engineering course which teaches you more than just that.
An IDEAL engineering college
Keeping in mind the growing need for students to learn subjects beyond engineering, SRM Institute of Science and Technology is introducing, Inter Disciplinary Experiential Active Learning (IDEAL) environment. Now, along with engineering, you can also take courses in subjects like economics, sociology, psychology, finance and journalism.
“For several decades, SRM group has created world-class engineers who work with some of the best organisations. But we have now realised that the future demands more than just good engineers. Our students have to be prepared to face challenges posed by the economy and society, and we are providing them with this opportunity to learn about it at the graduate level,” says Dr. P Sathyanarayanan, President, SRM Institute of Science and Technology.
With students in India seeking more inter-disciplinary programs and flexibility in course curriculum, SRM has addressed this demand by completely leaving the option of program path to the students. A student who is doing a Major in an engineering subject shall have an option of either taking Major specialization, like Internet of Things or Cybersecurity, enabling them deep learning or taking a Minor subject enabling them to learn courses across other disciplines.
“With the IDEAL program, students from SRM can be assured that when they graduate, they are far ahead of the curve compared to their competitors. Be it a job or a master’s program, their additional knowledge in other fields will make them ideal candidates for the future,” Dr. Sathyanarayanan says.
You can read more about SRM’s exciting new IDEAL program here.
And why wait? Apply for SRM Admissions 2018 here.
This article has been produced by The News Minute marketing team in association with SRM Institute of Science and Technology.
Main image source - Steve Jobs: Own work by Matt Yohe via Wikimedia Commons - Steve Wozniak: Own work by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons