Meet with Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthy - Director IIT Madras in Hyderabad

Date: Feb 25 2012

We had a small gathering with Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthy, Director, IIT Madras.("The star of the evening" - as quoted by Prof. Nagarajan )

(Around 40 of them turned up to greet the new Director in his first official visit to Hyderabad)

(Spotlight: An alumni from 1959-1964 (first batch of IITM) exchanges greetings with a graduate from 2009 batch)

Here are some of the highlights from the gathering:

• Prof. Nagarajan set off the event by letting the alumni know how the alumni associations are now working more effectively through various social mediums like fb, twitter, website, etc. (Around 20000 out of 38000 IITM alumni are now some somehow connected with the IITMAA & OAA) Most imp. note: Linkedin group of IITM is most active with 8000+ members and with almost daily news updates from the campus.
• Prof: Are you receiving monthly IITMAA newsletters? > Many "ayes" from the crowd. Next, Prof: Are you receiving too many mails? > Many smiles went up.
• Prof. SatyaNarayana highlighted how IITM is trying to cut the landscape foot-print by scaling up vertically. (Widely spread staff quarters will vanish and few buildings with 48+ & 90+ 3BHK apartments will serve that purpose. Same goes for hostels, adding floors in existing ones instead of increasing the number of hostels. How hostels are being made "monkey proof" and yet the monkeys continue to entertain themselves :P ? )
• Prof. David Koilpillai (who got to taste Hyderabad's traffic before coming) was in all smiles to declare we won the Inter IIT (yet again!) and the Hockey stadium now has Flood lights!
• The "Star of the evening" initially scared a few of us(especially the young ones - EE110 horror ) with his ppt which looked like 20-25 slides (full of text!) but thankfully as the evening progressed they only seemed to get us more interested in what was happening in IITM.

1. During his term he plans to increase IITM's focus on improving its research capabilities and making sure all IITM students have all the necessary skills to make themselves priced and valued commodities for the industry. (IIT's USP)
2. Making students learning experience more diverse and letting them realize what they wish to aim & achieve in future. (Stats: 25% purely interested in academics, 25% in sports, lit-soc, etc, 50% others) IITians need not necessarily become industry leaders everywhere, but they need to continue there role as "gears" of innovation in the future as well.
3. The focus of his ppt revolved largely around how IITM is improving its current infrastructure(focus on importance of new labs and purchase of other necessary equipment along with a few examples of sponsored research), and how IITM is recruiting faculty (target around 40+(per year) for next few years) and how it is encouraging more PhD's(with shorter PG duration of 4-4.5 years) and how it is actively pursuing MoU's with foreign universities of equal stature.
4. "Which college would I want to join in India if not the IIT's?" - referring to the student's apathy of not having too many colleges of international stature within India.
5. Q & A went off smoothly with the Director conveying subtly that JEE, MHRD, Coaching institutes, ISEET, College-cut-off's & other related issues(including media) are not IITM's priority challenges. >> Our focus & challenge is simply on producing world class research, students who can make a difference in the industry and 'Catering to existing Industry's/Society's problems'.

In short, during the event, the Director, a professor himself, relied largely on the strength of numbers & statistics to convey his message/vision of IITM to the alumni.

Some Quotes/Phrases: "True-untrue", "We are not MIT, we are IIT", "To be successful, you don't necessarily need the IIT tag".

Note: No Chicken's were harmed during the making of this event. Dinner was Veg. :)

Attendance Highlight: Godavari Hostel's 3rd Wing had the maximum attendance from any wing of IITM 10% of all participants.

Regards,

--

Mahek