If you are a final-year UG or PG student wondering what to do next, this fellowship is for you! The International Foundation for Research and Education is looking for 50 young minds who are excellent in academics and other extracurricular activities to award a year-long fellowship.
“This fellowship is for students who have done well in their academics and possess ideas to make a difference in this country. We want to spot the talents, nurture and help them achieve greater heights,” says Pramath Raj Sinha, founding dean of Indian Business School, Hyderabad. Sinha along with other like-minded businessmen from across India have come together to start the country’s first such initiative. “Most of us excelled in our streams. We felt that our education system was very specific and left little space for students to know about other streams. Also the system is very much job-oriented and do not allow the students to read, write and think. This fellowship will select a bunch of bright students and help them identify their fields of interest,” says Sinha.
The fellowship will cover the entire expense of educating a student including the training, accommodation, boarding and lodging estimated at Rs 8 lakh. The funds have come from over 50 corporate individuals, each donating over Rs 8 lakh. The fellowship will select 50 students from streams ranging from arts, science, commerce, engineering and management. “We don’t want students from the same stream. We want to have a class that will represent almost all the streams of study,” explains Sinha. The students will be introduced to a multi-disciplinary curriculum that will have a basic lesson or two from over 26 subjects ranging from history, philosophy, sociology, English literature and management at a campus in Gurgaon, Haryana.
The students will get to listen to historian Ramchandra Guha, sociologist Andre Beteille, chief economic advisor to the government Kaushik Basu, Suman Bery, Director-General, NCAER , social scientist Vivek Bhandari, English teacher Giti Chandra, business academician Rishikesha Krishnan, development economist AK Shiva Kumar, journalist and historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee among others. Faculty from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League, will also teach the students. “They will teach ethics, critical thinking and analysis, bio-sciences and leadership,” elaborates Sinha. Apart from the Ivy, there are other professors from New York University and Miami University teaching media and culture and visual art and communication, art appreciation and creative writing respectively.
“Every student will be assigned a mentor to guide them in their interests and help them decide what they want to do further,” he says. The mentors include NR Narayana Murthy, chairman and chief mentor, Infosys, Deepak Parekh, chairman, HDFC, Rajendra Pawar, chairman, NIIT, Ramesh Ramanathan, founder, Janaagraha, Ajit Rangnekar, dean, Indian School of Business, Jerry Rao, founder, Value and Budget Housing Development Corporation, Sanjeev Sanyal, founder and president, Sustainable Planet Institute, Uday Shankar, CEO, Star TV India, Analjit Singh, chairman and MD, Max India Limited and Adil Zainulbhai, MD, McKinsey and Company India.
UG and PG students in their final year can apply for the fellowship that is commencing on May 30. For information on the application process and admission, visit www.youngindiafellowship.com.
— dennis@expressbuzz.com
