The last day of campus visits was devoted to information technology. In the U.S., India is known for its IT outsourcing and call centers. In fact, engineering is one of the most competitive national university entrance exams. The government is adding more and more Indian Institute of Technology branches to accommodate the demand. Faculty recruitment doesn't seem to pose much of a barrier. Administrators tell us there is another national standardized exam for doctoral students to demonstrate their fitness as professors, and each job opening receives hundreds of applications.
We followed the now familiar rhythm of breakfast, board bus, battle traffic, and then arrive by 10:00 am at a campus. International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-Hyderabad) is a public-private partnership with degrees exclusively in IT. They have no departments; just research clusters focused on topics related to computer science. Hearing about research in a field outside my expertise makes me wonder if the investigators are really as innovative as they sound. If so, is it provincialism that has prevented me from hearing about their work?
 |
| We walk on the IIIT campus. |
Many universities we have visited boasted about their incubators to commercialize faculty research. IIIT gave us a tour of theirs, including a section devoted to companies developing products for health technology. When I graduated from college, the most popular pathways were to employment in large financial services firms or continued study. Nowadays, I hear that undergraduates are keen to start their own companies. In India, most graduates still want to secure jobs with multinational companies. For the risk-taking entrepreneurs, there is a growing ecosystem to nurture them.
 |
| We visit the university's biotech company incubator. |
Just a few buildings away from the university's incubator, T-Hub is another incubator for companies looking to use technology to disrupt industries. Neither one focuses particularly on students or faculty, though their co-location produces certain synergies. If you thought that sounded like tech speak, you should have heard the Silicon Valley jargon the entrepreneurs spout: growing a company "5x," working on a "vertical," giving an "equity share." What distinguished T-Hub was how much productive energy it seemed to generate. On several floors, start up team members were huddled in conference rooms, tapping on keyboards, and slipping into red booths to make phone calls.
 |
| T-Hub provides space and support for technology start ups. |
It was a far cry from many of the empty hallways and classrooms we had seen on several campus visits. The design of the space may account for its buzz. The founders had hollowed out an unused university library and added bright orange signs, exposed brick, and whimsical slides and hanging chairs. It was one of the few spaces we visited that felt not only finished and clean, but also stimulating. The well-appointed private universities we visited lacked the personality of T-Hub. Some of their companies seemed viable, including a device patients connect to their phones to record their coughing and diagnose TB. Others were not so high-minded like advertising screens mounted on taxis that change according to the demographics of the neighborhood. They all felt hopeful.
After eating lunch with faculty of IIIT, we boarded the bus for our final IT stop, consulting giant Infosys. Infosys employs over 200,000 people around the world and works with over 1200 clients to help them automate processes. The meeting with an HR executive promised to offer a coda to our university tours with the perspective of an employer. If I had any expectation that a visit to a corporate campus would be different from a university, it was dashed as soon as we entered the conference room and found the table set with bottles of water, teacups and saucers, plates of cookies, and a projector showing PowerPoint slides.
 |
| One of the dining halls on the Infosys campus. |
The speaker gave an adoring overview of Infosys's values and commitment to innovation among other buzzwords. It took half an hour and several attempts to redirect our host to discuss how universities can prepare graduates for the kinds of workers Infosys seeks. It came down to "learnability." The technology of today won't be the same one you'll be using in five years, so employees need agility and adaptive skills to stay current. He endorsed a liberal arts "attitude" for engineers, if not a liberal arts degree. I introduced the topic of H-1B visas, an opening for immigrant workers they have been accused of abusing, but our host avoided a substantive answer.
We finished the visit with a tour of campus. From the grassy quads to the cavernous dining hall filled with young people, Infosys certainly looked like a university. Like the incubator representatives, Infosys portrayed its work as almost messianic and remained unapologetic that all their innovation was in service to generating profit. Before we left IIIT, I mentioned to one of the representatives that the projects sounded very commercial. She agreed and let me know that they just received approval to start another incubator, this one to welcome projects that seek to advance social good.
Comments
Post a Comment