Presi teachers hunt for employers on campus

KOLKATA: Now that it's a university, Presidency College authorities are going all out to get the best employers to the campus. Teachers associated with the placement process are visiting these employers in different cities of the country, trying to convince them about the quality of students that the institution churns out. They are also trying to impress upon prospective employers the long, illustrious history of the college.
At the moment, former principal of the erstwhile college Amitava Chatterjee and another senior teacher are in Hyderabad trying to convince corporate houses to come to the College Street campus.Their next stop is Bangalore. Delhi, Mumbai and Pune are also on the anvil.
Among the companies that they have already been able to convince are Mahindra Satyam, Mu Sigma, Fair Issac, Wipro Analytics and Google. They will all be visiting the campus next month to meet both undergraduate and postgraduate students. At the moment, the two teachers are trying to negotiate with Deloitte.
While all these years Presidency almost turned a blind eye to campus placements for its undergraduate students, in the belief that all of them should pursue academics at least till the postgraduation level, there has now been a decisive change of stand.
The university now believes that not every student is cut out for academics and such students should be encouraged to enter the professional world through campus placements immediately after graduation. "Our brief now is that we should behave like any other professional institution like the IITs and IIMs and take the responsibility of placing our students well. We owe it to them," explained Chatterjee, who had also been heading placements for the erstwhile college for a long time.
It is not only the "cream" departments like economics, statistics and physics that are being targeted. The teachers have been able to market even humanities streams like English, history, political science, sociology, among other streams, to corporate houses. "Google is due at our campus on December 8 and has promised to take plenty of students from core humanities departments. This is indeed a breakthrough," Chatterjee added.
The new university has worked out a unique system to "tie up" with employers. Teachers from all departments will be responsible for networking with corporates and will even leave campus and teach/train employees of these houses so that they reciprocate by visiting the campus. At the moment such training is on at Mahindra Satyam.
"It would be easy to convince employers about our academic excellence if the top brass of the corporate houses in question come in contact with teachers," said Chatterjee.
At the local level, the university has started a dialogue with a large number of media and publishing houses and most have shown a lot of interest in campus placements. Cognizant Technology Solutions is among the IT firms that have locally tied up with the new university and are willing to take even undergraduate students.