Engineering students asked to be open to change and to be entrepreneurial

Updated on: Monday, September 03, 2012

Indian engineers are different from their western counterparts in reasoning, problem-solving and meeting market expectations, said Germany Aachen University's professor Klaus Lucka on Saturday.

Addressing students at the Graduation Day at National Institute of Engineering (NIE), he said: "This is not a clash of mindsets. It is our task to create and teach managing cross-cultural innovation networks."

He called upon the students to keep their creative potential and pair it with western predictability and structure. "Not only technology, but honing skills in communication and understanding customers and colleagues from overseas are also important," he said. The second batch of 680 students (autonomous scheme) graduated from NIE. Twenty-three BE, 7 MTech and four MCA rank holders received gold medals, while 31 received endowment awards.

Srinath Batni, alumus of the institution and chief guest, said: "Competition is no longer local, but it's global now. One will be assessed on global benchmarks -- and not with classmates or with other college students."

"Standing out in the crowd is going to be difficult. What one learns today may be relevant only for a short time, before becoming completely obsolete," he said, adding: "Once in the job, one needs to have excellence and improve continuously. One needs to aspire to be the best in everything (s)he does. Be open to change, and to be entrepreneurial, and stay away from the comfort zone."
NIE, one of the top 10 private engineering colleges in India, has tied up with OWI (Germany) for student/ faculty exchange programme for quality education.

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