IIT-B now takes faculty help to reconnect with ex-students

A building housing a full-fledged alumni centre was announced during the Alumni Day celebrations last year.

Accordingly, priority areas have already been identified for the centre, which will channelise all the resources that past students can offer through individual and corporate funding — student, faculty, staff and hostel development funds.

“We hope to start another chain reaction to get in touch with the alumni with the help of our faculty. And the professors have been very encouraging and are ready to help us in every possible way,” said Professor D B Phatak, convenor of the golden jubilee (GJ) celebrations.

Accordingly, the GJ team members including Phatak are in the process of meeting each and every faculty member from the over 20 departments, centres and schools of IIT-B.

“It’s a major exercise that we are undertaking. The basic idea is every professor is likely to be in touch with some ex-student, who in turn will be in contact with his/her batchmates. This will eventually help us to reconnect with our former students in a big way,” said Phatak.

The primary objective of getting in touch with more and more ex-students is to channelise their experience and intelligence for the betterment of the institute through advice and for garnering their support, financially or otherwise, for the different priority areas that have been identified by IIT-B for the alumni centre or otherwise.

Institution of chairs for professors and fellowships for assistant and associate professors who “register outstanding performance”; incentives to the non-teaching staff through performance-oriented, transparent recognition system and financial support to students are some of the activities for which IIT-B wants to have institutionalised and dedicated funding mechanism. And to realise its goals, support from the alumni is being seen to play a major role.