“After my first innings in the Steel industry for 36 years, my second innings began in December, 2003 with FIITJEE. I am a 1966 IIT Kanpur B.Tech(Electrical) graduate and held top positions in MECON/Steel Authority of India,(Under Ministry of Steel). I had a choice to settle abroad post my retirement and though this proposition was inviting, I did not take it up. I wanted to give something back to the society. Today, am happy with my decision.
If I were to say what separates FIITJEE‘s teaching from others is that we believe that coaching should have a holistic side to it. We start coaching from the time a child reaches sixth standard and then try to mould the child to his and his family’s expectations. The child is then ready to meet the challenges of global society, since
the triad of I.Q., E.Q. and S.Q. (Spiritual Quotient) are integral part of their personality.
The argument that the child is being coached too early does not arise because it is only when the child is fresh in his mind that he can be thoroughly moulded to whatever is needed. If children come to us later, they have already been exposed to another system of learning and then adapting to our style though not impossible but would be difficult. Once we adopt a child, so to speak, we try our level best to make sure that the child gets admission into either an IIT, NIT, IIIT or some other top engineering college in India. That is our responsibility.
Engineering these days is like a basic degree to have and such is the clamour for the degree that parents will do everything to make sure their child enters an engineering college/good professional college.
Since students come so young, we look at mental, physical and emotional coaching for the students. Times and life have changed and the world is going so fast that sometimes you feel this generation is not grasping things in the same way the older generation did.
The IIT exam pattern has become more objective than what is what in the early years. Yet it is not so easy to crack the paper. It was not easy during my time being subjective it included testing of English but then attitude towards engineering and demand were different.
Kids these days have lot of stuff to get distracted by. It is not so much of a single vision and working towards it. There is the mobile, internet, gadgets and easy communication that makes kids less focussed towards their goals.
In IIT Kanpur, at my time initially almost all the faculty were American. The type of teaching across industries has changed.
Today, there are video and online lectures. While they are good and do the job, they do not have the same feel as classroom lectures. For highly competitive examinations like JEE-M/JEE-A ,these modern tools
can be used as support.
Classroom lectures have a lecturer, a guru. It is not just the fact that there is a Guru in the classroom, the teacher’s vision transcends into the class. It is the proximity to the guru that make a difference to learning.
For us, our faculty are our drivers. They keep alive our students’ hopes and aspirations.
We are the only coaching centre that does not have an issue with getting good faculty,since we have a very unique, transparent & vigorous process of faculty recruitment & training. We have more than 1500 world-class faculty members, all very good. Almost all other coaching institutes try to poach our faculty.
Prof. R.L Trikha is the director with FIITJEE coaching classes for Engineering. He shares his view on the Engineering coaching prep.