Alumni Meet @ B.I.E.T.

Yesterday evening was quite an eventful one for the reason that I had the opportunity to attend the alumni meet organized by our college. Bapuji Institute of Engineering and Technology, Davangere, is an educational institute providing quality Technical education. It was started in the year 1979-80 and has since then produced thousands (8000+ to be precise) of quality engineers. It is currently affiliated to the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum. I’m proud to be associated with such an organization.

Going by records, you would be under the impression that our institute, by now would have managed to establish a strong alumni base like many of the elite institutes in India. If you happen to have built such a notion in your mind, then that’s exactly where you went wrong! Unfortunately, our college hasn’t been able to trace back to its alumni base and utilize this resource to their fullest potentials. The reasons to this are many. Let by gones be by gones. There is no point in brooding over the mistakes committed in the past. The college admin seems to have realized its mistakes sooner than later, and is keen on rectifying them at the earliest. Keeping this in mind, they had arranged for an alumni meet on 8th September 2007 at 5pm in civil seminar hall of our college.

Compared to the previous year, this year’s alumni meet had more number of attendees both in terms of number and diversity of representation. We had people who had passed out of our institute way back in 1984 to the very recent batch of 2007. The ground was all set and everyone was eager to discuss on how to go about the whole initiative. Practically speaking it would be highly impossible to trace back every alumni of this institute. So it would be a commendable accomplishment, if we could at least trace back to the alumni who passed out of our institute in the recent years.

The event began with a beautiful invocation. It was followed by a feedbacks/suggestions session, where alumni shared their views on how to strengthen the alumni base. The following are the suggestions/ feedbacks given by the attendees of the event.

· The biggest problem the alumni are facing currently is communicating effectively with the institute. In order to overcome this, they need a common effective channel for communication. What can be more effective than having an interactive college portal?

Ø Building an interactive web portal helps the alumni to update their contact information without much of a hassle.
Ø The alumni can contact the college admin directly and can give candid feedbacks and suggestions.
Ø The college can promote itself through the website which would help aspiring students to get the required information about this institute.
Ø It will be a great platform to share tons of valuable information and can have experts in their own fields share their experiences with others.

· Inviting the alumni as guest to various events in the college would help them build excellent rapport with the students who are currently studying in the institute.

· Starting activity clubs to bring together students and alumni who share a common interests in fields like music or any other technical field. This would help them to get exposed to wonderful talents who share common interests and thus build new acquaintances.

· Inviting alumni with expertise in a particular field to deliver technical talks, conduct workshops for pre-final year students on how to face interviews, guiding students who are aspiring to pursue M Tech/MBA etc.

· The recent trends in campus recruitments reveal that most of the colleges which have a strong alumni base have managed to woo biggies in the IT industry to visit their campus for recruitment. As a lot of the college alumni are currently working for reputed companies, they would definitely try their best to persuade companies to visit our college and thus enhance the opportunities for students aspiring to get in to reputed companies. In order to achieve that we need to have a vibrant training and placement cell which should be headed by a full time (I say this because we are currently having one of our professors as our P.O., who manages this task along with his regular classes) placement officer.

· Issuing identity cards to alumni so that even after they graduate from the institute, they could still have access to the resources of the college like the magnificent central library, etc.

The event was presided by the principal of our college Dr. B. T. Achuytha, who gave valuable insights on the current ventures taken up by the college management. He went on to speak about the expansion of the ECE and CSE department. He also spoke about plans to build a sophisticated auditorium in the college campus, which would be able to accommodate around 1.5k – 2k people at a time. The college looks forward to get some kind of monetary assistance from the alumni. Being a full fledged private institute has its own limitations. Hence I don’t see anything wrong in them seeking help from alumni in this regard. Our principal also promised to look in to the issues discussed in the meet and do the needful.

Everything has to have a beginning and this alumni meet is definitely a small step in achieving the same. It’s good that they have taken some firm decisions in this regard. We still have got a long long way to go. They have kick started a new movement. I wish them great success in their venture!

PS: The next alumni meet is scheduled to be held in the first/second weekend of December 2007, in Bangalore. I am really looking forward to it. Hope they disseminate the information regarding the same well in advance and ensure that the meet is a grand success!!