An open letter to rector NUST.

* The following email was posted to all  students of seecs, faculty of NBS , faculty of SEECS ,rector, Pro-rector and respective DGs of most NUST schools. We got some encouraging promises , some criticisms and some calls for anger management.Its highly unlikely anything fruitful will come out , unless we all make our voice heard


Respected Sir,

On 6^th of November a new era began in our lives. A momentous occasion in our lives, it was our convocation.  It was to be the beginning of something special , something divine . But perhaps that something special never came to fruition. It was a wonderful opportunity to come around and meet each other after a duration of about four months.  While we were happy to meet each other , something wasn’t right. The atmosphere looked gloomy. We were sitting together and waiting to get our degrees from a prestigious Pakistani university, yet we strangely felt betrayed. We felt betrayed because when we imagined our counterparts in other parts of the world who went to their countries’ leading universities, we could not imagine them being jobless(for everyone who wants to see what joblessness means). The predicament that we were in was hard to comprehend. How many people in this world graduate from top schools and remain unemployed?  Sadly for us we are one of those unlucky people.

Whatever our destiny has decided for us we are willing to accept. But we donot only hold destiny accountable for all of this. We strongly believe they are a lot of issues in this university which need to be addressed for the potential survival of future graduates. We do know that the economy is stagnant and there is a lot of saturation in the Electrical/Electronics field. This however has not stopped universities such as IST and CASE from helping their graduates getting hired. This suggests surely there is more work that can be done to market our graduates.

Suggestions:

Please make a career development department with COMPETENT people who place CV’s of all graduates into the HR departments of leading companies. This department must have contact numbers,addresses of most companies in Pakistan .  This career department should also have a up to date website with vacancies in various fields being shown so that alumni can check out if a job is available that suits them. The department must have contacts with the HR departments of various companies so that a vacancy could immediately be notified. Some might say that this is already being done. Please note the present performance of the career development office is farcical and they are in almost no contact with the alumni

The second thing that is required for a graduate in these testing times is a versatile skill set . This can only be achieved when courses are allowed to be picked and dropped at will across various disciplines . The reason why this is not being applied is not comprehensible by us , but it is the need of the hour and if we fail to allow this the future graduates will suffer a worse fate than us.

The third thing which we strongly believe needs to be done is to improve the quality of projects we do in our campuses. We believe that our graduates lack the finishing touch where our peers in leading universities around the world do possess.  We very arrogantly talk about Stanford, Caltech but we fail to emulate their study models over here. If we visit the website of MIT open courseware , we can see that almost all engineering subjects have a forty percent weightage for projects and a similar weightage for LABS . Exams meanwhile have a very small weightage. This suggests that only through practical work can we really gain knowledge with a finishing touch . Theoretical Knowledge is like reading a story which you are never really part of. We must also focus on cross disciplinary projects because in all sincerity any practical project has to be cross disciplinary in nature.  A robot without software is useless, and you certainly can’t expect electrical engineers to create software for you.

Fourthly, the industry cares less about what we learn in the university and emphasizes more on hands on experience on equipment by specific hardware manufacturers example Allan Bradley, Siemens, Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Huawei. Please hold constant practical workshops of these companies because in the end workshops like these do help one to gain practical experience.

As far as research is concerned, we strongly believe there is limited research being done that can really change Pakistan. In fact, in many cases we do not need research but we only need design and analysis to solve Pakistan’s problems. Unless we help our society to reach the top we surely can’t expect this university to change anything. We expect faculty members to lead projects that can potentially change Pakistan. Just to mention over here , Dr Rehan Hafiz recently floated a project in which electricity is being produced by the kinetic movement of cars which can be used to light up traffic signals. Such innovative projects when properly assigned to a cross disciplinary team lead by a faculty member will give rise to the much touted “entrepreneurship” term . Such a project perhaps does not require cutting edge research as this technology is readily available , but what it requires is a will and vision , which perhaps we lack. Research for the sake of attracting dollars is useless to Pakistan as a whole. The need of research shall arise when we reach a problem for which a solution already does not exist. In our case , all the solutions do exist. Unless we change our priorities, we really can never become great and we really can never become a knowledge based economy. The other plus side is that this will create more jobs for our graduates and more revenue for the university.


The other day an ambitious prospective Nustian came to us and asked enthusiastically about Nust . We could not help but guide him for the better and we thought maybe Nust is not the best option right now . This perhaps is the beginning of a trend , a trend that can sadly see Nust lose its charm and glory unless it acts to change things.

In all this we aim to help our university improve and help the future graduates more easily tackle the job market. We hope to hear from your side soon to further discuss the suggestions.

Planting Engineers….

Farmer to son: “Son! the crop is ready to harvest , we have to hurry otherwise the rain would possibly ruin our crops”.

Son: “Ah… we have ample time to do this job”.

Farmer: “No! My son, it is better to get our job done , don’t leave it for tomorrow, we have put a lot of effort in planting it”.The son didn’t care about  the old man's advice and one day  a storm came and along with it the crops were destroyed .

Four years back we were like seeds, planted in the ever fertile soil of NUST, accompanied with good faculty. We were going well and in June 2010 we were ready to get into the  professional world to reap our reward, like a crop fully grown and ready to get harvested.

 But like every other story with a sad ending, our university only told us about the hype, fed us with books, and then they left us for the so called Professional world. It didnt care about  the importance of making us ready for the Professional world. It left us like a forgotten child . And here we stand today looking out at the world and looking at those false promises made to us. 


 The relevance of our degree to the industrial world is zilch . In addition to this the university did nothing to facilitate us in our quest to find a job. We cannot truly hold them entirely accountable for this , but still I believe they have a significant role to play in our present suffering.

 We are lost truly . But I hope that the people coming after us donot suffer the same delusional scenario that we are facing today and I hope that NUST does more for its students than just bragging about them. 

Why democracy sucks ?

 A couple of years ago when I was still enrolled in NUST, I had the privilege to witness a student presidential campaign. The candidates were final year students and they required a majority vote from the rest of the university to win the election. It began with lobbyists trying to persuade their friends and batch mates to vote for their candidate. Later the respective candidates were to give elaborate speeches on what they have achieved and what they are to achieve. The first candidate elaborated on what was he to achieve but his approach was very pragmatic which resulted in realistic, believable and achievable goals. The second one however, justified why our country was in tatters. He began to describe his goals and consistently repeatedly made outlandish statements such as inviting a Belgian team to hold a first ever laser light show. Sure that sounds impressive and ambitious but anyone having spent a day at our university knows that all of that is a delusional lie. However, the “educated” university students  gave huge applause to such outlandish statements and not surprisingly the guy won . To this very date the students of NUST have yet to organize any credible event, let alone a lightning show, that could perhaps market the NUST brand.  And thus I reached a conclusion after experiencing this and that was that democracy was mass hypnotism at best. A university is a microcosm of the outside world. You wont find a more educated class of voters than  here . And if they can be duped into believing this , then it surely suggests that a system of democracy is flawed. People said then that a democratically elected student would be the ideal candidate which is ofcourse Rubbish . In essence democracy suppresses the attribute of wisdom  and magnifies the attribute of popularity.

That same year I also watched the obama-mccain townhall meetings , in which they debated a few points . It was ludicrous to say the least. Two people duping the whole of America into believing that they can fix the economy . But a couple of years later , the economy is still in tatters and the president has still not delivered. What will eventually happen is that the respective parties will replace the “puppets” with new ones that can make even more outlandish statements than their predecessors.

The whole system is a theatrical system in which the candidate disillusions the mind of the majority by making outlandish statements but says them in a rather deceivingly convincing manner . No wonder our leaders such as Altaf Hussain ,Shahbaz sharif , the bhuttos are such great orators . They reached the top because they were so good in manipulating the minds of the masses by giving them false hope . It is due to this reason that honest and pragmatic men like Imran khan , do not always win  and perhaps can never reach the top. I also remember a hadith here which implies that people are like herds and leaders are like shepherds. Where ever the shepherd goes, the herds follow. The salvation of Pakistan surely does not lie in democracy.  

The salvation of Pakistan lies in a system through which honest, wise men can rule and save us from the tyranny of democracy.