DC | 21 hours 55 min ago
Dean of students Prof.L.S Ganesh speaking to media at IIT Madras. -DC
Chennai: Most of the freshers who join the premier technical institution, Indian Institute of Technology live out of the comfort of their homes for the first time. Also, most of the students slog hard to crack JEE and would have never faced failures before in their life. Thus, when they enter the institution and start facing the real world, things go awry.
Identifying these prevalent issues among students, the senate of IIT-Madras has approved the introduction of a ‘life skills course’ for first-year students as part of the curriculum from this academic year, starting July 23.
More than 800 students are expected to join the institute this year across various streams and the initiative is to provide the course for all these students in one semester, said Prof L.S. Ganesh, dean of students, addressing the media on the campus.
Prof M. Shivakumar, head of Mitr, the guidance and counselling unit of IIT-M, who would be coordinating the course, said the students would be given two credits for this course and maximum efforts are made by the committee to make it an experiential learning.
The professors said everything possible to enhance the living conditions of the students should be addressed so that they learn in a conducive atmosphere. “We believe that it would be one of an early attempts and first-of-its-kind to provide life skills course for such a large institute,” said Prof Ganesh.
The programme would also have activities related to gender diversity, workplace issues, crisis response training like fire-fighting techniques and outbound experiential learning.
