Students of Mass Communication and Journalism Pushpavati Nayak and Preeti Kamat who have bagged nine gold medals each were presented the same at the 70th and 71st convocation of the Karnatak University held in Dharwad on Saturday.
While the convocation address was delivered virtually on Friday, the gold medal presentation programme was held offline on Saturday. Among the doctoral candidates, Laxmi Doddgoudar of the Department of Kannada Studies also secured nine gold medals.
Janhvi Joshi of the Chemistry Department, Shahin C. of the Zoology Department and Vijaykumar Kharoshi and Chandralekha V. of the Biochemistry Department secured eight gold medals each.
In all, 451 gold medals, 81 cash awards, and 147 scholarships were presented during the offline convocation held on Saturday.
Because of COVID-19 restrictions, the university had not conducted the annual convocation for two years. In all, 31,694 candidates received various degrees, 8,733 postgraduate degree, and 311 candidates received doctoral degrees.
Speaking at the medal presentation ceremony, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, M.B. Chetti called on the students to imbibe moral values and also be committed in their efforts if they were to reach their goals.
“A life can be successful only if it has values and returns something valuable to society,” he said. Prof. Chetti said that the need of the hour was to upgrade the quality of education.
He said that NEP-2020 had been introduced to make the country’s students compete globally. Although the country had over 1,000 universities and 50,000 degree colleges, none of them had found a place among the top institutes in the world, he said, emphasising the need to think seriously over the issue.
Vice-Chancellor of Karnatak University K.B. Gudasi and other were present.
