Opportunity awareness is the key

Updated on: Monday, May 24, 2010

Students should start taking decisions about their careers themselves after carefully analysing all options available to them, was the main theme of experts at the sixth edition of The Hindu Education Plus Career Fair 2010, held in Chennai on Friday and Saturday.

While a number of career choices were made due to peer pressure or parental pressure, many students take up engineering or other courses because they were given a wrong impression of the opportunities. Awareness is important, the expert panelists said.

The fair was inaugurated on Friday by Information Technology Minister Poongothai Aladi Aruna. She said students should give up the “herd mentality” and asked them to choose their courses by themselves without bowing to external pressures. N. Ram, editor-in-chief, The Hindu, said students should look at the college infrastructure and the faculty apart from placements in previous years and college atmosphere. G. Viswanathan, chancellor, VIT University, spoke of the opportunities that were opening up in the higher education sector in the country.

At the session on medical and engineering entrance counselling which drew a number of students and parents, Sudha Seshayyan, registrar, Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University talked about career options in medicine.

Allied health sciences

After running through the availability of seats for MBBS and BDS, Dr. Seshayyan also pointed out that allied health sciences and alternative systems of medicine had lots of opportunities.

She counselled students to go through the websites of government medical colleges and also to obtain profiles of the different courses before choosing their course at the time of counselling.

Spotlight on IT, energy

A. Jayaprakash Gandhi, education consultant, dwelt at length on the engineering counselling process. He provided a preview of the process for students. In his presentation, he said that the IT and energy sectors were the sectors to look for growth in the coming decades. He also asked students to look at college infrastructure and other details before choosing their course of study.

At the panel discussion on ‘IT EDGE', panelists Santhosh Babu, managing director, ELCOT, R. Ramkumar of Cognizant and V. Venkatakrishnan of DO-IT, advised students to study well in their course of choice without worrying too much about future opportunities in the IT industry. They said IT was ubiquitous and the industry would require more and more subject specialists as it expanded and advised students to try and excel at what they did. For those interested, doing specialised certification courses would provide a step up, they remarked.

Opportunity awareness is the key

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