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Mentorship program for student projects It is seen that the quality of projects coming out of our college is not up to the expectations. Even if it happens, the practical implications of such projects are limited, or not reaching where it is supposed to be. At the same time, we see many other colleges in kerala, witness exceptionally brilliant project activities among students. They get more support from faculty members as well as alumni, be it a technical activity or a non-technical activity. Recently, I happened to see the IEEE Bangalore section initiative on humanitarian projects. Selected projects from all across the country are getting funds from IEEE. Moreover, each student team gets a project mentor, who informally involves in the activity to help them out and guide them throughout the project activity. This mentorship program helps them to achieve better results and the quality of the projects got improved a lot. It is also felt that the alumni support to the students in the campus is not as strong as in other campuses. The proposal is to introduce a mentorship program for student projects . Students, who are interested in exploring more on technical areas, and trying to do projects of various domains, especially not part of the academic projects (mini/major projects), are sometimes stuck in the activity because of lack of support. It is true that the number of students who take up such projects is very less. But, still number of success stories, is far lesser. The mentorship program aims at filling the gap of lack of support. In the NITC alumni network, you can see a good number of people in each technical and non-technical domain, working all across the world. A good number of people are in higher academic institutions too. If, for each student project (mainly informal)that are challenging in nature and can create an impact on the technoworld, a mentor is able to support and help them out in making their path easier, it will be a satisfactory achievement for us. Above all, its the responsibility of the alumni to give back to the college which helped us grow. I am listing down the key points of the proposal. For each project, from any domain or from any branch, if a team or individual feels like getting support from alumni, they can connect to IEEE SB, which can contact a core team from alumni. They can choose a perfect match of a person who is interested to mentor the project The activity will be completely informal. The involvement of the mentor can be decided on a case by case basis, or the SB can come up with certain rules. The mentorship just means guidance and helping the teams in achieving the results faster. People from industry, will be knowledgeable in getting things done in organized way. This helps students to fill the gap of academics and industry. The projects are recommended to be producing something useful to the society. In short humanitarian projects. In this case, the IEEE SB can take up the publicity of the end product, and even creating a business idea out of it. The alumni support will be valuable in this case as well.

Even theoretical projects are recommended, since you can find every type of technocrats from alumni, who may be interested to mentor it. The funding for projects, shall not be covered in the activity, but can be thought of based on the response.

I see that the majority of students in NITC, dont really get themselves immersed in technical activities or projects. I dont think the situation can be changed all at once. But, this is just a starting point to improve the situation to the extent possible by us. Its better to give it a try. 2. Website to have blogs and forums for technical discussions This is a long-pending suggestion from Dr. KPM (retired EE Prof). We could not go forward with this, although we took some steps to start with. The proposal is for a website which will have blogs and forums, (may be public, or limited access to a closed community), covering more of technical topics. This is a common platform for all faculty members, alumni and students to share their knowledge on a topic of their interest. Bogs can be used to share information. Forum can be used to discuss on a topic, or to clarify doubts. There is a question on why such a website, since we have Google which gives you everything. There are times, when we see that, for a set of topics, documentation or tutorials from net are too difficult to understand. You might have encountered a case when you search for something and you end up in a document which simply explains everything with mathematical equations, without giving any physical interpretation. A few of our faculty members have their own style of explaining things; same is the case with a few of our alumni as well. This will be easier to understand, with avoiding mathematics to the possible extent. Such data is missing in the internet, or too difficult to find out. Moreover you may use the forum to share useful links and documents, which explains a topic in the simplest way possible. It is also to be noted that, this website can be made extremely useful for placement interview preparation as well. This website activity itself has to be taken up as a project by a team of students, who are expert at web designing. Or, this could be even given to some team, who are interested to explore web designing. Hosting a website is very cheap nowadays, and IEEE SB can easily find funds.

NB: The activity shall get initiated by IEEE. But the whole NITC community must benefit from it. It should not restrict itself to IEEE members.