Nandini Consultancy Centre, a chemical business consultancy firm based in Chennai and Singapore, organised an All-India essay competition on the subject ‘Should the duration of engineering course be extended to five years ?’ recently.
The essays were submitted by a number of senior and junior engineers as well as students of engineering colleges.
The following six participants were selected for the award — Mugundan, S Gokul Raj, Krishnan Padmanabhan, Sindhu Ravindran and Priyanka Gupta.
A few arguments that were brought out in the competition included the point of poor students being at disadvantage, if the duration of the course was extended to five years as they would be discouraged from joining engineering courses with the increase in expense.
Those in favour of the extension of engineering period argued that three-year period for an effective coaching of the core subjects was not enough.
Also, the additional one year should be dedicated to conducting workshops on various concepts, interaction with experienced engineers and management professionals from industry, identification of the areas of interest based on proper assessment of the opportunities and the strength.