NED’s new batch of engineers

Karachi
The cream of students who come to study engineering at the NED University of Engineering and Technology are not able to give their best due to unreasonable examination system and outdated courses being taught at the varsity.
The new batch of 1,213 engineers who graduated from the varsity on Wednesday felt that the courses taught to them needed to be updated according to the demands of modern market and research.
The 23rd convocation of NED university was held at its campus on University Road where degrees weer awarded to 1,131 were BE students and 80 ME graduates. Moreover, 424 degrees were awarded to post-graduate students.
Two more candidates, Hasina Khatoon and Hashim Raza Khan, were conferred PhD degrees. The former is a former faculty member while the latter is an assistant professor at the electronic engineering department.
Ifrah Jafri of the electronic engineering department bagged the gold medal with a GPA of 3.98. She plans to return to her alma mater and teach, but she believes that the course taught should be tailored in line with the modern market and research. “I will prefer to come back and teach at NED University. If I get a chance, I’ll surely give a few recommendations for tweaking a few subjects on the modern lines,” she said while talking to The News. “But first I plan to apply to universities in either Germany or USA for further studies. I will give the GRE exam in April.”
Jafri believes that electronics is the mother of all engineering fields. She said she got fascinated by it when she was doing her intermediate.
Talking about the quality of engineers produced by her varsity, she said NED gets the cream of students from Pakistan but was not able to produce optimum results due to the dilapidated intermediate examination system.
She said the examination systems should be changed to test the concepts of students rather than require them to reproduce answers.
Muhammad Tariq of the metallurgical engineering department and a fellow at Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission stood third with a GPA of 3.63. He too agreed that the courses being taught at the university were not up to date and needed to be revised.
He lamented that theory had more weightage in the syllabus than practical work and said this did not help the students. Also, he said, three to four teachers have gone abroad for higher studies and haven’t returned so far.
Danyal Rashid Khan, who received a degree in textile engineering told The News that almost all the students enrolled in his class had gotten jobs and only a few were still searching. “Our faculty has good interactions with industries and most of the students received their job letters in December, well before graduating,” he said.
Khan and a few other students too remarked that the job market asked for candidates with good knowledge of marketing, merchandising, garments and planning and none of these components were a part of their syllabus.
“We are lucky to get jobs without any difficulty,” they said. “It only happened because NED is a prestigious institution. Otherwise we would have had to face a lot of problems.”
Speaking at the convocation, NED’s vice chancellor Prof Dr Muhammad Afzal Haque said that this year the university had launched three new undergraduate programmes of textile sciences, management sciences and development studies.
“Such innovative programmes help educate and train our young people to take on the emerging challenges in this competitive world,” he said.
He said the financial support received from Sindh government and the Higher Education Commission (HEC) had enabled the institution to pay off all its outstanding external loans. However, he said, there were certain liabilities for which support of the Sindh government and HEC were indispensable.
Haque said the NED University had strategised its long and short-term plans which included establishment of two more campuses. “It is essential to have at least two more campuses to cater to the need of the ever-increasing population of this mega city which the university finds impossible to do with its existing infrastructure,” he said. “I appeal to all relevant quarters of the government and members of business and philanthropic community to extend financial assistance to help NED pursue its high academic goals.”
The HEC chairman, Prof Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, was the chief guest on the occasion since Sindh Governor Dr Ishrat-ul-Ebad could not make it to the event.
Addressing the students, Dr Ahmed said the government had been facing a very serious dilemma regarding how to provide better education to the country’s youth making up a large chunk of its population.
He said at present only 8.3 percent of the country’s population had access to higher education but this ratio need to be boosted swiftly. Referring to the financial states of government-run universities and particularly NED, he said soon a meeting with the planning commission will be held and hopefully some good news for the academia will come out of it.
He stressed the need for parents spending quality time with their children to play a role in their character building. “Lack of tolerance and patience could be addressed with the help of parents and teachers,” he remarked.
NED University’s pro-chancellor and Sindh education minister Nisar Ahmed Khuhro said he wanted to see a university every district of the province, and then two universities in each district.
‘Lack’ of funds
Though the NED University is known for its high standard of education, its 23rd convocation on Wednesday failed to reflect its prestigious values.
The students claimed that between Rs4,000 and Rs8,000 had been collected from them to arrange the event which had been planned for March 17, which for the most past was spent by parents perspiring in the heat due to the dearth of pedestal fans and lack of chilled drinking water.
“Due to financial crisis the university had no money to organise such events and had no other choice but to collect money from students. The funds available with the varsity administration were barely sufficient to hold the convocation ceremony with the usual dignity,” the officials lamented.