University’s bid to help commerce students log on to ICE-age jobs

If the University of Pune’s latest efforts succeed, some of the city’s commerce students can look forward to a better future in the emerging information technology-communications-entertainment (ICE) age. In a bid to make commerce students more employable, the university has decided to introduce two innovative post-graduate courses — MCom (Information Technology) and MCA (Commerce). The courses will be introduced from the next academic year (2009-10) and any graduate can take them up.

The University’s Academic Council has already approved the courses and the process of drafting the course curriculum has started. There has been a pressing demand to make the commerce syllabus more industry-friendly.

Accordingly, the university has already changed the curriculum of 220 courses. “Keeping up with the policy, the university has decided to introduce these courses,” said dean of Commerce Faculty Babasaheb Sangale.

“The M Com (IT) course will be a combination of commerce subjects and their computer applications. It will help students to equip themselves to meet the ever-changing demands of industry in the areas of finance and accounting,” added Sangale.

MCA (Commerce) will be a two-year course instead of three years, as is the case with normal MCA courses. The unique feature of the course is that any graduate is eligible to take admission to it.

“The course will be designed in such a way that computer application subjects will have an interface with commerce subjects. The whole idea behind making these changes is to give an industry orientation to the commerce courses,” he explained.

At the graduate level too, the university is introducing changes. The Business Communication subject at the second year level (S Y BCom) will now be taught in English medium only. “We have made it compulsory, catering to the needs of industry. In course of time, other changes too will be made,” he said.