“There are no secrets to success it’s a result of preparation, sheerhard work and learning from failures”
This quote indeed portrays the character of today’s speaker.
On the 23rd of October 2020, we the students of Mushtifund Aryaan Higher secondary school had the privilege to interact with Prof. BK Mishra, Director IIT Goa. To begin with a brief introduction of Professor though mere words by no means can define his towering personality.
Prof.Mishra graduated in Metallurgical Engineering from NIT Rourkela. He did his masters from the Wayne University and went on to acquire his Ph.D. from the University of Utah (USA). He served as Professor at IIT Kanpur from 2001 to 2011. He was also a visiting faculty to The University of Utah(USA) and The Aston University (UK). In2001, He was appointed as the Director of CSIR-IMMT Labs Bhubaneshwar where he remained at helm until 2017.In2017, he was appointed as director of newly founded IIT Goa and continues to be. Besides nurturing young minds, Professor was and continues to be involved in active research, his fields of interest being Particulate Materials, Discrete element Method, Maths Modelling etc. Till date he has 240 papers in international journals and about 15 patents to his name. He has been honoured with several prestigious awards such as the VASVIK Award, CSIR Technology Award, National Mineral Award and so on and so forth.
The session began with Professor being welcomed by our Director Prof.Vyankatesh Prabhudesai.
Professor took up the topic of individual transformation. He began by highlighting the variety, versatility and increasing importance being given to education now as compared to the initial years after independence. He gave a brief overview of our New National Educational Policy stating its advantages in being more Skill development oriented, Research promoting, Internationalized, and Multidisciplinary, and could do wonders if implemented properly. However, he did make it a point to mention that indeed there is a lot that needs to be done such as recruiting more faculty, spreading awareness etc for it to yield its desired results. Professor then spoke on the problems being faced by mankind and what we as students can do to help our society. He suggested the principle of “Talent, Diversity, Interaction” which leads to creativity and which eventually leads to innovation.
Now what is Innovation?
Many of us have a wrong perception that innovation is simply an idea which would fetch us money but it’s not. It’s something as simple as changing the way in which something is done. Professor gave us the example of High Jump records which showed a gradual increase with time. This is because people innovated new ways of adjusting their body postures and thus changing their centre of mass which helped scale more heights.
As the session progressed the discussion went on to what should “our calling” be. Professor stressed on 3 things which could be a cause of our calling that is
1. Doing things that we are good at.
2. Helping people and making the world a better place to live.
3. Feeling appreciated.
However sometimes things might not go the desired way and we might get our calling from somewhere unexpected. He gave the example a student KR Birathiunan who on his way to the examination hall was involved in a major accident in which unfortunately he lost his father. However even with such a state of mind he managed to successfully clear the exam and entered the Institution of his choice. Moreover, Professor also gave his own example from his research days where things seemed to have halted for him until he read a book “My experiments with truth” By-Narayan Desai which changed his outlooks on life, and with the help of the values that he had learnt he got all together a new start to his work. So, after you realise what your calling is and what are the things that you are good at, so what next?
Professor gave an example of his student Prakash who realising his potential set up a start-up “EGOMA” which was based on usage of nano technology. This company basically manufactures machines to convert and analyse objects at sub-micron size. He suggested that one might start a business, go back to training and basically keep working hard on that field.
In order to widen our horizon on what innovation is and what are its results Professor gave us many more examples including some from his own research work.
- Professor along with his students set up Fluid inter facial Pvt. Limited in collaboration with the Indian Navy. This was aimed at building a machine that treats emulsions, oils released by ships before disposing it into the surrounding waters.
2.Professor also had spent some time researching on the architectural marvels of our country that is our temples. Hailing from Odisha, he had closely been observing the several odissi temples. Despite not being able to come to conclusive results he did discover the depth of science in our architecture even then.
3.He gave an example of the famous “Four colour Problem” in which one had to colour all Indian districts with 4 distinct colours in such a way that no colour should touch each other. Till date only a computer proof is available for this.
4.He also gave a brief overview of Properties of Sand which make it different from solids, liquids and gases. Sand particles are not rigid which doesn’t make it a solid; they involve in elastic collisions which makes it differ from gases which involve in elastic collisions.
5.Packing of Spheres is another topic of interest that Professor introduced to us.
Kepler had proposed that Triangular in 2D and Hexagonal in 3D is the most efficient form of packing. However, for several years this remained unproven until JD Bernal proved it in the 1950’s.
And this brings us to Professors topic of research that is this study of the process of packing using computer simulation.
Professor beautiful explained to us this experiment with the help of videos, simulated images etc. In this experiment agglomerates of sub-micron size were simulated and observed as they broke in steps that is Fracture, Shatter, Disintegrations. In extension to this Professor also touched up on the topic of Phosphor coating which is an important industrial activity in the production of screens. In this process in order to determine the packing of phosphor particles intruder particles are introduced which analyse the closeness, elasticity etc and on basis of which the coating to be used is selected. He also described an experiment of his wherein particles with less density with suitable velocity were pressured go to below particles with more density and this phenomenon too has vast industrial applications.
Professor emphasised on the fact that now engineering is becoming more of a multidisciplinary subject with time. To survive in this revolutionizing world, one needs to adapt their skills to suit the needs. He gave the example of the initiative by IIT Goa which promoted the use of technology for benefitting public health programs.
Professor with his vast experience of life and having interacted with so many students gave us some golden phrases to be remembered for life.
1.Fear of being wrong, being rejected, losing, emotional discomfort should be simply thrown out of our lives. One should interact and involve with full confidence and faith in oneself, do not care of what others might think of us etc.
2.There will be times in our lives when there will be transitions, you might have to adopt an entirely new way of life. In such times one should keep the belief in oneself keep working hard. Plan the way out and keep introspecting and learning from your mistakes. Professor stated two films “Dangal” and “Chak de India” being his personal favourites which teach us these things.
- Learning is not all that spontaneous. It is a gradual process where there are ups and downs. Initially when we are unknown to the vast world, we think we know everything. Then by the time we cherish this vastness we realise that we know nothing. Then finally having experienced a lot of it we realise that we know something.
Professor ended his presentation with a crispy quote:
“If you want to go fast, goal one. If you want to go far, go together”
This Quote really emphasises the need of cooperation. This is because finally it is more important that you become a good social being who is cooperative and trustworthy.
Now in order to give a brief idea of what is beckoning us in the future to come, Professor took us through short preview of IIT Goa.
IIT Goa being one of the latest IIT’s was set up in Farmagudi Goa on the 14th of July 2016.
Currently it offers courses for BTech student in Mechanical, Computer Science, Electrical and Maths and Computing Engineering. It plans to expend this in the following years.
It has excellent infrastructure with well-furnishedlabs, medical centre,halls,auditorium etc.
Recently,IIT Goa under Professor able leadership signed a MoU with France under the Goa Atlantic Cooperation Program(GOAT).Under this program both parties agreed to cooperate in marine sciences and visit of faculties and students for their internship projects.
Besides this an MoU has also been signed with Portugal,University of Georgia and the Goan PWD and GEC.
IIT Goa has been promoting a lot of field works besides academics which helps in social, physical growth of its students. Initiatives such as CATeRS-Centre for appropriate technology for Rural sector, Agriculture and farming; TASLe-Technology and Society learning and LAMP-Learning and Multidisciplinary Program have been set-up. Under these projects the students are allowed a 6-month interval in which they visit the sites of their choice, identify the shortcomings and work on them.
Besides this the students of IIT Goa are involved in several other activities such as participating in Inter IIT sports competitions, Formula Bharat meet etc. Many have bagged laurels in various fields, some examples being Devang Jain getting the KVPY Scholarship, Satwik Sogun winning the state taekwondo competition and so on.
Courtesy the freedom of research and innovation given to the students by the system students are finding out new and intriguing ways out of problems.
A student Priyanka Arora came up with an easy to wear “Hydro Check” wrist band which indicates the body water level and the optimum amount required.
Devyani Maladkar managed to design reusable sanitary pads. While Himanshu Sharma designed a technical system, which bagged him the first place in Sparkle “I can crack the IT Challenge”. The students are also involved in a lot of social work. Two students Pavitra Bhade and Prachi Kashikar designed a system to monitor female infanticides and thus curb such inhumane activities. Even during the destressing COVID times these students continued their efforts of helping the society. They designed 3D Printed masks, studied on aerosols and published several technical papers. IIT Goa also predicted a supermodel of the COVID 19 curve indicating the peaks, time by which it will flatten and so on. Professor concluded his presentation with the promise that a lot more is in store for the future.
This was followed by a few relevant Questions by our Director Professor Vyankatesh.
The first Question being on the hostel facilities available in IIT Goa.
Professor answered by stating that a lot of effort has been put in to ensure that students enjoy the best hostel facilities, to which our director remarked that he himself being an IITian had learnt a lot more during his hostel time with his peers than the academics. Professor also gave an example of a former Aryaans student, Deep Desai who was initially reluctant to stay in hostels and mingle with his peers; eventually he realised the value of interaction and its importance.
The second Question was pertaining to BTech, MTech,PhD degrees offered in IIT’s and IISc as compared to other international institutes.
To this Professor responded that there is a wrong perception among students that Ph.D.degrees offered in India are not on par; but that’s not the way it is.With the increase in number of Quality faculties in India the Ph.D. students have access to the best mentors and the best available infrastructure, which makes the Ph.D.’s offered in India amongst the best in the world. While the B. Tech courses Beach offered continue to be the best.
And the Third Question was on what makes IIT’s the best, Professor humbly replied that it’s the blend of students, faculties and the infrastructure.
A question was also asked by our student on what IIT Goa plans to do in the next 10-15 years. Professor replied by saying that it plans to increase the branches, the infrastructure, the facilities and so on; and all the people at IIT Goa are motivated to bring it on par with the stature of the old IIT’s.
The vote of Thanks on behalf of our institute was proposed by our student,Atharva Lotlikar who beautifully summarized all the proceedings and thanked Professor for sparing time from his busy schedule to virtually grace our institute.
I would like to thank our Director and Mentor Prof. Vyankatesh Prabhudesai for organizing this interactive session and for giving me this opportunity to write the report for this amazing session with Professor BK Mishra.
Written by,
Anvesh Bandekar
XI Regular MAHSS