TCE Alumni get together in USA-Invitation

From our Principal, Dr. V. Abhaikumar:

Dear Alumni,

Greetings to you, your family and your friends.

The vision of our founder Philanthropist Shri Karumuttu Thiagarajan Chettiar has been our guiding spirit throughout the 50 years of professional service. The Chairman of the College is Dr. (Mrs.) Radha Thiagarajan, (former Vice-Chancellor of Alagappa University) and the Vice-Chairman and Correspondent of the college is Mr. Karumuttu T. Kannan,

The college has made rapid strides in the areas of Teaching & Learning, Research and Development, Industry Interaction, Infrastructure Development and Student related activities.

Our college is planning to organize its Golden Jubilee celebrations during 2007-08. In commemorating the golden jubilee event, we are organizing a get together of alumni residing in USA one in east and another in west. The main objective of the get together is to gather a feed back from the alumni in the areas of Teaching and Learning processes, Research & Development, Infrastructure development and Industry institute partnership.

Date: Aug 26th 2006
Venue: Newark Hilton

Date: Sept. 3rd 2006
Venue: Santa Clara Hilton

Hilton Newark Penn Station Gateway Center -
Raymond Blvd,
Newark, New Jersey,
United States 07102-5107
Tel: +1-973-622-5000

Tentative Agenda:

3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Social Networking
4:00 PM - 4:15 PM: Welcome Note by Dr. V.Abhai Kumar
4:15 PM - 4:45 PM: Vice-Chairman & Correspondent Address
4:45 PM - 5:30 PM: Keynote Address by Eminent Speaker
5:30 PM - 5:45 PM: Q&A with the Keynote Speaker
5:45 PM - 6:15 PM: Break
6:15 PM - 7:30 PM: Pay It Forward - Breakout sessions
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM: Working Dinner Session plus Summary of Breakout Sessions
8:30 PM - 9:00 PM: Action Items, Next Steps

It would be a great honour, if you could participate in the meeting and give your valuable suggestions. On behalf of Thiagarajar College of Engineering, we cordially invite you for the get together.

It would be helpful, if you could kindly confirm your participation by way of sending a reply to :

principal@tce.edu (or)
mpal@spikesource.com(West) (or)
manian_s@yahoo.com (East) (or)
bala.pitchandi@gmail.com.

Kindly redirect this mail to your friends residing in USA.

Looking forward to your positive response.

Thanks and regards,

Dr. V. Abhaikumar,
Principal,
TCE.

You may visit our college website at http://www.tce.edu.

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This email was sent using TCEMail Service.
Thiagarajar College of Engineering
Madurai - 625015 (India)

How about an Endowment?

Now, the perception here about Indians has changed about so much, that higher technology and quality engineering is being associated with India. Indian engineers are celebrated and to my shock and surprise people respect so much of our engineering education system. But, there is room for more.....

After seeing the way American universities work, I believe that one of the few things that we lack is a coordinated effort through alumni action and endowments. The big universities here, work in this way - after the students graduate out, they remain committed to the university throughout their life, sharing their profits with the alma-matter all through. Many even leave their will donating their entire property and estate for their university. The alumni and other interested people, create their own grant schemes for rewarding worthy students with scholarships, creating new departments and buildings, expanding the education scope, rewarding worthy professors and so on. For eg. Harvard has more than $20b (one lakh crores) from the endowments that it can use for research, student development etc. Most other top schools have more than $1b in their endowment. But, sadly in this our educational systems lag so much behind.

How abt we start a small endowment and grants system by us. To start with we can pool up some money that we can use to:
1. Annualy give rewards from our endowment to best teachers, using some selection criterion. This award and the money it carries should really motivate our good teachers to stay on and provide best of their efforts. This would progressively enhance our system.

2. Support scholarship to worthy students, seriously in need of money. Once those students graduate they might return their favor by supporting more of their junior students and it could start a chain reaction.

3. Support department's efforts in modernization - syllabi selection, course selection, material support and some of us could go even further in giving guest lectures on topics that we have expertized at our work.

4. Guidance and information transfer for career - getting jobs and higher education....

I guess, many of them are in our reach... If just our batch pools money, we can make few thousands a year and this could atleast support a bit of awards and scholarships... But, once the process starts we could involve all our senior and junior batches, creating a vast system bringing a cyclic reaction. Believe me, thats how Harvard, Stanford & MIT evolved.

You might ask, what is in it for us??? Apart from the satisfaction from philanthrophy, you can also benefit from a better prestige for the college, as it would be a prestige for all of us. For eg. 30 years back IITs were not much known, but now we respect all those batches of people for what they have done to bring up the great institutions. We can build greater networks and centers of interaction, that wud be a win-win situation for all of us.

The occasion of 50th anniversary, could really suit us for what we r goin 2 do. Let us make this small step. We can start out with our initial awards and small token scholarships, then and there.

TceHelp Updates

It's been a long time since I updated everyone about the group activities. So here goes:

Membership:

We have now about 320 members and growing. We have members all the way back from 1965 batch and up to the current fresh TCE-ians (those who joined TCE in 2005). Thanks to all the alumni and the students who have eagerly joined the group. I would ask current students to request their friends to become member of this group so that they have instant access to the alumni.

My Recent Visit to the College:

I recently visited our college during my vacation to India last November. I had extensive discussions with our Principal and our Principal showed me around the changes that he has been doing both infrastructure-wise as well as from academic point of view. Our College is now ISO 9001 certified. They are now implementing an ERP system for College Operations (Yes, college office is all automated, now :)). Thiagarajar Advanced Research Center (TARC) is up and running. Our College is gearing up for the upcoming Golden Jubilee celebrations.

Words cant do justice to all the changes in our college. So here are some of the pictures I took.

How do we participate in TceHelp:

As I have said before, TceHelp is the one of the ideal forums where current students and professors can interact with the alumni. The success of TceHelp is entirely up to how effectively students/professors/alumni use it to help each other. Students particularly should post any questions/doubts they might have about the job opportunities and/or post graduate studies or any other topic for that matter. Let me repeat some important features of TceHelp that I have mentioned before:

I would like to highlight two sections in the group where alumni can upload information to - The "Files" section and the "Links" section. Please feel free to upload useful information to these areas. You can get to these places at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TceHelp/files/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TceHelp/links

Please use folders to organize the links and files so that it's easily scanned through.

Group Database:

We have a Group Member Database, where you can update your personal details – Name, Year/Branch, Company/University, Email address and Area(s) of Expertise etc. This would not only serve as a central database for the students to know where all the alumni are but also would provide an idea of what areas different people in the group are working on. This will help us to identify where different alumni are and help us organize local alumni meets and plan our alumni activities better. Students can also update their information to help identify their areas of interest.

Please remember that only members can access this database. Your privacy is protected. Also, this is only on a voluntary basis. If you chose not to provide your details, that is just fine. Alternatively, you may also choose to ignore some fields of the database – like phone number etc and provide partial information.

The Group database can be accessed here.

Some of us have already updated this database. I strongly suggest that every member enters their information into this database.

TceHelp Blog:

I have started a Blog for TceHelp at http://tcehelp.blogspot.com. This Blog can be used to post messages & notices for TceHelp members and anything that would be of interest to us. I haven't posted many messages there yet. I would like to invite interested alumni & students to be contributors to this blog. Please email me and let me know if you'd be interested in taking up this task.

Future Plans:

We are working on a few big things for our Alumni network and those plans are being worked out with our College Alumni Association. Details would soon be unveiled. If you would like to know more about these, please send me a personal email.

So in closing, I thank all of you again for joining the group. Let's keep the discussions going and grow together.

Hello World

This is a blog that I have created to have messages posted for TCEHelp YahooGroup, which is an online discussion forum for Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India students, staff and alumni.