Don’t Lament Over Not Receiving Calls from IITs

The plight of developing India is that its ambitious people follow footsteps of a few successful people blindly and do not derive innovativeness from their success stories. Owing to this plight, a large middle class section of India just cannot imagine a successful career beyond IITs and IIMs for its engineering aspirants.

But if take a glimpse of another side of this dark notion in India, we have iconic examples of Steve Jobs, Satya Nadella, and the founder of Walmart who never had any association with IITs or IIMs.

Steve Jobs wasn’t even an engineer. He learned everything in consumer electronics. Just like Steve Jobs, Satya Nadell, the new CEO of Microsoft, too never went to an IIT institute. He’s an alumnus of Manipal Institute of Technology in India. Walmart was first established in a remote town somewhere in USA before it became one of the largest corporations in the world.

All right! With so many iconic examples of people making it big in engineering without a degree from IIT, our unreasonable desire for IIT appears surreal to an extent.

We enjoy discussing about all the above iconic examples in our daily life but we hardly care about acknowledging these examples personally. As a result, these examples are best used by students taking part in a school or college debate competition. They don’t matter too much for people in a real life.

This blind trend in engineering aspirants not only prohibits many young aspirants to think beyond IITs or IIMs, but also restricts their options of innumerable achievements in the field. This is also viewed as the key reason behind constantly growing competition in IITs.

Despite several efforts, this trend in education is not going to end anytime soon with just a couple of discussions held among a few elites. To break this stereotype in education, we need to understand where we are heading to. We need to set ourselves free of our personal demands.

Don’t come out like an expensive machine from an engineering institution. Your aim should be to become an innovative thinker because that’s what the world wants. An innovative thinker not an IITian. An innovative thinker can be found anywhere irrespective of an institution.

You should never lament over not getting calls from an IIT because, may be, that is what going to take you a long way in your career. There’s always another way. Sometimes sitting doing nothing helps you discover ways to define yourself. So just patiently wait and watch the way Steve Jobs and Nadella did.

Enjoy your journey instead of lamenting over not receiving calls from IITs.
This post was contributed by Monika Rai, askiitians expert