IIT Bombay Updates its UG Curriculum to Reflect Modern Workplace Trends

New Delhi: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay has updated its undergraduate (UG) curriculum to reflect modern workplace trends.

It has become a well-established practice for the engineering graduates from IITs to routinely seek out professions in a variety of non-core engineering sectors, including management, consulting, finance, and start-ups, among others.

As part of their usual core engineering curriculum, management, entrepreneurship, and design courses will soon be offered to IIT Bombay engineering students in addition to humanities subjects.

The non-engineering topics, sometimes known as "HASMED" or "Humanities, Arts, Social Science, Management, Entrepreneurship, Design," are of considerable importance in the new course curriculum.

This is in addition to a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) multidisciplinary approach paired with the fundamental engineering courses of the branch of engineering that a student is pursuing.

According to Prof. Kishore Chatterjee, head chairperson of the committee that worked on the curriculum revamp, the first step was to try to determine where the IIT Bombay graduates are heading after receiving their degree. This can be clubbed into three basic groups, specialist, generalist, and super-generalist.

Specialists are those wanting to follow the path of academic or research work, or join a core sector enterprise. While Generalists are those who aspire for a career in management, analytics, consultancy, among all, which is away from the core sector.

Apart from these two extremes, there is another group — super-generalist, where a student wants to take the path of Startups and entrepreneurship in different sectors and where knowledge of core engineering as well as other areas is required.

Once all three groups were identified, it was important to see how the needs of each of these segments can be met.

As per Chatterjee, it is to support the graduating students in becoming leaders in their chosen fields. The revision of the curriculum is the outcome of an 11-person group that was formed in 2019. The committee was also represented by the students.

Chatterjee said that the committee developed a basic curriculum based on the information formally gathered over the years through student interactions and placement trends. This was then distributed to the institutes' different stakeholders, including students, professors, recruiters, and alumni for final calibration.

IIT Bombay's Dean of Academics, Prof. Avinash Mahajan, stated that the last time the prestigious institution's curriculum was altered was in 2007.

He said that the new curriculum has made HASMED and STEM courses a part of the course curriculum. Even though the old curriculum did offer several options for electives from different disciplines.

Students must choose a minimum of two to three courses from each basket, as well as the related scientific courses and basic engineering branch disciplines.

Illustrating his point with an example, Chatterjee said that a student in the mechanical engineering branch will need to study the topics that are essential to that branch. Depending on the branch, the number of required subjects may change.

In addition, each student must choose two courses from the HASMED and STEM baskets as well as a minimum of three electives from fields related to mechanical engineering.

Moreover, each student must enrol in five extra courses from the basket of courses or a combination of them.

The institute will collaborate with non-engineering schools on campus, including the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IDC School of Design, Shailesh J Mehta School of Management, Desai Sethi School of Entrepreneurship, and others, to offer HASMED courses. Collaborations across various engineering areas are urged between different engineering branches for STEM education.

Students at IIT Bombay will also have a required "Makerspace" where they are expected to make something for hands-on experience, in addition to this huge array of courses.

Mahajan said that the "Makes Space' will take the place of the current required engineering drawing workshop course. Depending on the needs of the product being developed, this might also take an interdisciplinary approach.

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