Career launch through campus placements has been the hallmark of all the Universities and all colleges in the country. Unlike in western countries, where Universities do not go beyond organizing job fairs, in India, it is almost perceived as the responsibility ofany reputed University to ensure placements through campus for all its students. The NITs and IITs have traditionally been the go-to-place for the brightest minds in the country, since they offer the mostchallenging jobs with most competitive remunerations.

As a step towards standardization and coming together for mutual benefit and foster long term association, the first All NITs T&P Conclave was initiated and hosted by NIT Trichy on 28th June’24. Participants for the conclave were from NITs across the length and breadth of the country – Arunachal Pradesh to Surat and Srinagar to Puducherry.

The Conclave was inaugurated by Prof Makarand Madhao Ghangrekar, Director, NIT Puducherry. Prior to taking over NIT Puducherry as Director, Prof Makarand was distinguished Professor of Civil engineering at IIT Kharagpur. Speaking on the occasion, Prof Makarand said it is imperative that academia reinvents rather quickly incorporating Artificial Intelligence in the curriculum of every discipline of study. He said, breaking silos and moving into multidisciplinarity is the way forward. He further emphasized the importance of Institutes complementing each other while being in a
state of healthy competition.

Prof G Aghila, Director, NIT Trichy – the host Institute stated that this is the first time that the Heads of Training & Placement of all the NITs are coming together to collectively leverage the strengths of the NIT system. She also emphasized that Institutes have to make the necessary adaptations to engage and nurture students with Specific Learning Disability (SLD). With the student strength going up,
Institutes must strive for more and more automation of all functions including the training and placement function. This would help in better data analysis and understanding of the trends.

The day long deliberations could shed light on many critical parameters in campus placement such as Day 1 nomenclature, the assessment processes, Diversity Equity and Inclusivity in campus placements, post-selection processes, nuances of Cost-to-Company – a term that is often very misleading for a typical student who is just only 20 something years old and more importantly, the peer pressure, societal pressure that build on the students by flashy news articles of high campus placement salaries leading to severe undesirable mental stress on the students. The deliberations on the assessment processes led to recommending physical mode than virtual mode as a post pandemic measure, to bring back the lost social skills of the post pandemic students.
With respect to Persons with Disability (PwD) and students with Specific Learning Disability (SLD) it was suggested that the recruiting companies must take care of their special requirements such as additional time, scribe, bigger fonts, etc. Dr Kumaravel, Prof and Head, Department of Orthopaedics, Thanjavur Medical College elaborated on the various obligations and rights of PwD and SLD students and the need to create suitable accommodations for them in academic Institutions. He exhorted the teachers to play the most important role of building the confidence and the right attitude amongst PwD and SLD students.

The session on ‘Sharing Best Practices” paved way for cross fertilization of ideas and practices across NITs and leveraging the best by all for mutual benefit and synergy. Prof. Karvembu, Dean (Students Welfare) and Prof. Bakthavatsalam, Convenor of the Conclave also spoke on the occasion.

   

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