A good teacher ..

The past two years I have been taking great interest in reading, updating my knowledge and seeing how this helps in improving the satisfaction level of the customers, who are your students. It has been a very satisfying experience.

Some learnings from the past two years, which got me involved with teaching in such great measure was the customer impact. I looked at everything from the customer perspective and it clicked.

A year back there was a report in the Times of india newspaper which spoke of the employability of MBA graduates in the country. As per the report it was barely 10% and the reason ascribed to it was the poor experience level.

Firstly in a system where jobs are in short supply, the bright ones land up with jobs abnd others are left out after graduation. Instead of wasting time it is a great utilisation of time going for a Post Graduation. With no knowledge of Industry and the outside world, these students straight out of their graduation, walk into a Post graduation class. For them this is another class where they need to take everything given by the Lecturer like the sacred word and study, mug it or whatever and reproduce during the exam ditto and score high marks.

Finally when it is time to get jobs, all these high scoring students fail to secure any. It is a period of dejection. Considering the peculiar socio-economic situation of the country, it may not be possible for all graduates to get enough work experience before they go out for a post graduation course. Gross Enrolment ratio at 18% in higher education is a great worrying factor for the government.

How do we then give the necessary experience for the students of MBA. They have an internship programme after the first year and before the second year classes start. Most of the students feel a lot more confident of their knowledge and abilities after the internship. Just imagine if the students are allowed to submit a mini-project which has some industry exposure of the concepts they have learnt during the course of the semester and if the students are made to do a presentation of this towards the end of the course, how much their interest in the subject would have increased.

In my opinion every student in a group of 2 or 3 should be made to work on industry projects for most of the important subjects during the course, to help them understand what working in the industry is like, how industry looks at job and how projects are completed with the necessary inputs so on.

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