| |9 NOVEMBER 2022HIGHERReviewon. Through hands-on training, the understanding of concepts and the confidence that students acquire will improve which is also hard to replicate through online programs. How would you define the importance of interpersonal/soft skills in the engineering domain? Interpersonal and soft skills are very important. Over the last 10-15 years, we educators have realized its importance more and more. It is not only important to understand science and apply it to solve engineering problems; it is equally important to have the ability to articulate, to express, and to convey our thoughts, whether orally or through writing, through preparing a document, in terms of making a presentation, or in terms of the body language. There is a plethora of ways through which communication can be done, and students as well as professionals need to pick up these skills because only then can they provide leadership. And leadership is essential to be able to pick up big and challenging projects. Owing to this, interpersonal and soft skills have an equally important role in solving modern-day engineering problems. A 2021 study states that around 38 percent of faculty seats lay vacant in IITs. Why is this happening in some of the premier engineering colleges in India and what are the steps taken by IIT Roorkee to tackle this issue? It is true that we can take more faculty than we have but IITs are very conscious of the quality of the faculty that they would like to hire. And unless we are sure that this faculty is good enough to serve the institute for the next 30-35 years, we prefer to keep those seats vacant rather than filling it up with whatever is available in the market. It is not like we have a dearth of faculty aspirants or applications, but we follow a rigorous multi-tier process, and not many people are able to qualify at the end of the process. Going forward, what are some of the major changes that you wish to see in the Indian engineering education domain and how can Indian engineering educators make our graduates compete with their international counterparts? We have to focus more on team-driven projects. While individual projects are also important because they make students more confident, through team projects, they can define more realistic problems instead of only taking up software or mobile-app driven problems. Owing to this, the best way to improve engineering education is to try and create opportunities for interesting projects that the students can do but at the same time, not lose focus on fundamental science because all engineering is driven by fundamental science. If we lose this focus, then our engineers will not be grounded and they will not be prepared to take up new age technologies.
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