The pipeline from student to IT employee
AIITEU member, Bengaluru
A standard trope of an engineering college student is one who never attends classes and is confused through their academic and early professional life. While this can be written off as some kind of self- deprecating humor, there’s a larger structural issue underlying it.
I am a dual degree student from a private engineering college finishing my last year of studies. This is my second last semester, where I am doing an internship with a big software development company, and I have been reflecting about the transition from academia to industry.
The Beginning
Before college, a majority of students’ sole focus is cracking the entrance exams, and many have probably not given enough thought to what comes beyond that. Once they clear the entrance they may have a mechanistic way of determining their engineering branch of study — shortlisting a few colleges, looking at cutoffs for different branches and maybe checking on the statistics on placements at the institute rather than their own interests or expectations. I chose a dual degree program because I could not get my desired branch due to not meeting the cutoff, and in some ways it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
The first year in college is common for all students where we get a taste of subjects from different branches of engineering. Single degree students start their branch specific specialisations after the first year, whereas dual degree students start their’s after the second year. I was afforded an extra year of iteration and freedom to decide on computer science as my engineering degree. I feel this flexibility and freedom is really important and can help reduce a lot of unnecessary strife that students experience in college.
Single degree students do have an option to switch to a different branch of specialisation to the one they chose while registering after the first year, but the process to do so is extremely hard. Very few people are able to make that transition based on changed or newly discovered interests. Different branch departments have different performance based requirements for this ‘vertical shifting’ but it mostly entails having extremely high CGPAs.
This is a practice that has constantly puzzled me — a better way would be to have weighted average scores in the favour of subjects that are pertinent to the specific branch a student wants to transfer to. Even if I refrain from thinking of immediate solutions, and try to dig deeper into the cause of this structural issue it always comes down to management.
The Reality of Engineering Studies
The decision to go to an engineering college is a life choice, a decision that many students may take during senior high school. But what you study in engineering college is often not by choice and once you’re down a path there’s not much room to change course. Often the rigours of academic life and heavy load of assignments prevents many students from thinking about the bigger picture or developing parallel interests. Slowly but surely alienation due to disinterest or a lack of clarity about their prospects sets in, and absenteeism in classes is just one of the symptoms.
Of course one can engage with multiple interest topics through electives, but there are no other avenues or mechanisms to demand change. Outside of one’s own peers you’re largely at the mercy of seniors as ‘informal mentors’ or talks/ discussion fora organised by the students body. Student bodies are often restricted in their politics as they tend to limit themselves to cultural organising; they rarely have a say in the curriculum or governance even though they have representation on the governing council.
Entering the “Real” World
I have seen a lot of my peers vie for a foothold in the IT industry, irrespective of their branch of specialisation. One reason could be that it is relatively easy to break into a software related career. Even without a computer science or related specialisation one can get entry level jobs doing basic automation or QA testing if they know some programming. The software industry is also not as mission critical, as say working in mechanical or electrical engineering work. Work in IT is iterative, career progression is faster and there are avenues for learning on the job. But this also opens the door to exploitation of entry level IT workers, due to the lack of a specialised degree and perceived depth of knowledge.
When you start working in the IT industry you are still a student of sorts, the job takes over where college cuts off with your learning. College also teaches concepts in a technology agnostic manner. Any “course” is an artificial construct created by truncating the actual subject matter at some point. Of course, the way the knowledge is presented and tested (through exams), often isolates the subject, and connecting the different threads can be very tricky. Steps need to be taken to make this connection explicit.
When I started my internship I had a 15 day training and I was asked to go through a lot of vendor specific documentation. I was given a test case study which was finally deployed and I got a sense of the gap between my conceptual college pedagogy and how things are deployed on the job. This is natural. But for students from other branches of engineering, like say mechanical or chemical engineering who have landed in IT, that learning curve is steeper and they might also be treated and viewed very differently within the organisation. This further sets in another layer of alienation.
I was privileged to be able to take a gap year before engineering college and be able to afford an extra year of studies in college to be certain about what I wanted to do. Not everyone can do that. And like I said in the beginning, the decision to study engineering is a life choice, you have to live with the trials and tribulations it brings. But it can be extremely overwhelming to live with this choice, if you’re unable to course correct as you develop an understanding of your interests and the job market. To me, this seems more and more like a feature of the system and not a bug.
