Students going to industry for internships is passé. Now industries come to college.
The laboratories or compact workstations, set up by the industries using their own equipment and technology, in select colleges, are called “Centres of excellence”.
Though the concept is not new to technical institutions, it is only now that more industries are coming forward to set up such facilities in tier-2 city colleges, which is now evident in the Coimbatore region.
In the last few months, a few colleges in and around Coimbatore have state-of-the-art centres of excellence set up on their campuses.
The model works this way: An industry, specialised in any sector like automobile, automation, software development, textile engineering, ties up with a college to set up a compact model of its work place in a limited area complete with the latest equipment.
With hand-holding from the industry, some trainers are lent to operate the centre, while at the same time some faculty from the related department are selected to undergo hands-on training on the systems under the ‘train-the-trainer' mode at the industry. For a while the trainers from the company and the trained faculty train the students. After a while, the company hands over the total operation of the centre to the college. From time to time, the equipment and faculty are updated keeping with the latest in technology.
“The centres of excellence are a boon for the students. Here, the teaching is restricted to 20 minutes and the rest of the hour is given to the students to ‘play' with the equipment. They are given total freedom to put their hands on all the systems and get results. They experiment and get confidence to develop products," says P.V. Mohan Ram, Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, PSG College of Technology.
The college has been a pioneer in the region in promoting the concept of centres of excellence since 1990s, and today it boasts more than 20 such centres.
The advantage to the students is that they are motivated to work day and night in these centres, the freedom which they do not enjoy in the college laboratories that are regulated by time. They move away from theoretical learning to hands-on training without having to go outside the college campus. Interest in product development leads to patent applications.
“Facilities can be used free of cost. When a special crash course or credit courses have to be taken up by students, there is a cost that partly goes into a maintenance kitty and paying the faculty who teach the course at the centre,” adds Mr. Mohan Ram.
But the operation of the centres differs with the college. Some run only training programmes for which there is a blanket charge. But whatever the modality, students are full beneficiaries, which they as well as faculty agree to.
For the industry, the concept is a win-win situation in that students are made industry-ready in the institution itself and not after they join the industry. There is big saving in terms of time and money when they do not have to be trained in the industry. Since the centres are up-to-date, the companies also send their personnel to get hands-on training in the latest equipment under the guidance of the college faculty.
The centres also enable in taking the industry-academia interaction forward. There is constant connect between the faculty and the company that has set up the centres of excellence, which turn out to be mutually beneficial.
