It may be news to some, but MNR is now a fully deemed institute hence, we have a Director, instead of Principal. The new Director is Dr. Krishna Kumar (ex-Dean of IITK, HOD Aero Engineering dept @ IITK). The first thing I noticed after entering the school building was "Students carrying Cell Phones". The cell phone boom has hit India, and MNR was no exception. (Still felt kinda odd, oh well it might well be pangs of jealousy.)
I met Prof. R.K.Srivastava (Head of Placement and Training). The placement was at around 75-80% average. TCS, Wipro, Infy, Cognizant hired bulk of the students. The highest salaries were around 2.5-2.75 lakhs per annum. Was kinda disappointed that we were still not attracting the top MNC firms. (Comparing and contrasting with IIT's, where top5 consulting firms and you name it international firms are recruiting). Prof. RK Srivastava's main focus was on getting the database of the alumni up to date. Once this was in place, the idea was to contact senior MNR' alumni at influential positions to help with the placements. Alumni are you listening :)
Speaking of alumni and placement relationships, Prof. Srivastava mentioned about getting Microsoft India on campus. The school was still engaged in preliminary discussions with the HR dept. of Microsoft. After I returned to US, and talking to our alumni here, I found out that we have two of our alumni at top-executive levels at Microsoft. Manish Sinha (General Manager, Asia-Pacific, Microsoft) and Sudeep Bharti (Senior Exec Microsoft). After getting them in touch with Prof. Srivastava, they have initiated processes on their end to get Microsoft India to recruit at MNR. Here is an example of these two alumni that the rest of the MNR alumni need to emulate. Manish Sinha and Sudeep Bharti may your tribe increase. BTW did I mention that Microsoft India is offering starting pay of 5-6 lakhs per annum.
Later, Prof. Srivastava arranged a meeting with Director Dr. Krishna Kumar. In my few minutes of conversation, he had my total attention , when he mentioned the only way MNR' was to become a world-class institute was by hiring top-notch faculty. This has been his appeal to all of us, if you know of any top-notch candidate; MNR would be interested in hiring him/her. Contact him @ kkumar (at) mnnit (dot) ac (dot) in. He appeared very keen and motivated, and I have my hopes pegged on him. He is also keen on starting two new departments Bio-medical Engg and Material Science Engg to keep on with the developments in this area. In addition, a new branch "Information Technology" has been added and number of students per branch has been increased.
Later I met Prof. Krishna Kant (Prof Computer Science) who helped arranged for my guest-lecture. Prof. Krishna Kant is looking for alumni at S/w companies to help them with expensive software like Cadence/Synopsys and Mentor Graphics CAD/VLSI tools. Alumni please get in touch with Prof. Krishna Kant [kk (at) mnnit (dot) ac (dot) in]. I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Prof. B.D.Chowdhury [whose opinions/dedication to teaching I respect a lot]. Prof. Chowdhury mentioned about challenges of maintaining and improving the quality of the students, with increase in the student and faculty population.
I briefly toured the MNR campus; there were a few new buildings, some new faculty and the library facilities have improved considerably. The students mentioned that they have internet connection through LAN in the hostel. Quite a few students had computers in their rooms. For those interested in literary activities, Quizzing is still fairly active in the campus. The students were organizing a quiz competition with a professional quizmaster from Calcutta and had a budget of Rs. 50,000 for the Quiz show. In discussions with the director, he mentioned money was not the issue; judicious use of money was where the challenges lay ahead. There were lot more faculty traveling abroad to present papers at national and international conferences.
Afterwards I gave a brief talk on Microprocessors, state of hardware industry, and shaking up "Frog-in-well" mentality, hopefully this motivated atleast a few students. Unfortunately, I had the catch the Prayag-Raj train back to Delhi the same evening, so I had to cut my visit short.
Anyway, if you are still reading this, here is what you can do, if you can help with the placements, please push the HR dept. at your organizations to hire at MNR' both full-time as well as summer-interns. Please get in touch with Prof. R.K.Srivastava (rksciv (at) yahoo (dot) com) or me (kamannav (at) yahoo (dot) com). It may be a good opportunity to visit the MNR campus through the campus interviews, reminiscence your old days, grab chai at your favorite dhabha, and recruit students at end of the day. As far as I can see, it is a win-win situation for everyone. |
