I look for Excellent Decision-makers with innovative thinking that helps students solve complex problems, say Prof.

In an interview with Shiksha.com, Maria Achary, Assistant Professor, J S Kothari Business School, discusses the several important differentiating aspects that enable School stand out from other institutions offering similar programmes. She discusses the relevance of practical learning, guest sessions, research projects, and other topics in depth.

Achary is a PhD holder in Deep Learning in Multi-Disciplinary. She has her expertise in Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Database Management systems, Business Analytics and Big Data Analytics.

Read the complete interview in detail.

Q: What are the salient features of the teaching methodology adopted by your college? How does this differ from others?

A: Our College has adopted excellent features like

1. Creative Teaching: Animated contents are more effective to understand and learn as compared to books.
2. Real-world Learning: This is expressed with students using real activities or mini-projects which helps them to understand the reality of the concepts.
3. Role-Play: Students are handover with the topics and are made to perform a short skit based on which we evaluate their skills and efficiency, to find the effectiveness of their concepts.
4. Spirituality: We conduct the session like the Bhagvat Gita which influences the actual inner feelings of an individual to be a human.
5. Guest Session: Different domain Industry experts are been called to interact with students to share the actual behavior pattern of the industry and what they expect from students to be.
6. Research Projects: Wherein Students are said to do an activity to find an industry domain problem for their summer internship project and work on that problem by providing effective AI techniques with their respective domain.
7. IPDP: Integrated Personality Development Program, in which students are focused on their Emotional level, Spiritual level, and mental which play a very important role in their life to lead a personal and professional level.

Q: How are you preparing your students to be industry-ready?

A: I practice the following strategy to make students industrially oriented:

1. Practical knowledge: In which students are given real cases to work on projects by visiting the company and programming skills and which software to use for the same. i.e subjects like Business Intelligence I teach them about tableau and Orange tools or mini anaconda software or google colab's when using machine learning concepts
2. To Sharper the Communication skills: It's one of the key factors which provides tips for an individual to get employed in a good position. We train them to do some creative activities in which students need to write a script and present the same in front of other colleagues.
3. Reading Books and Newspapers Regularly: To keep the students aware of the current affairs with what is happening in the market and different sectors of industries
4. 4. Build your profile to show your accomplishments: We train the students to build their profiles on different social media like Instagram, Linkedin to make their profile look to the world about their expertise.
5. Pursuing Online courses: Where I inform them of many online courses which need to be practiced apart from the syllabus for extra knowledge about the subject which they prefer example Artificial intelligence (Machine Learning ) I inform them to pursue the courses from the Coursera platform Eg: Data Visualization using Python for beginners etc...
6. Work on their weakness: some students are very good with technical knowledge but when it comes to the actual performance of communication they fail so I help them to connect with their weaknesses and guide them for overcoming their weaknesses.

Q: What are the qualities you are looking for in student applicants? what qualities do they need to do well in your course?

A: I look for Excellent Decision-makers with innovative thinking that will help students to solve any complex problem in their life.

Willingness to learn something new: As a student, he or she must be eager to understand and learn new concepts day today as it will play a vital role in job profile later on.

 Adaptability: Students must be very keen on adopting new concepts as it a pivotal in a business environment, as change is colossal in a business environment. With adaptability, students can easily get into an ever-changing and evolving environment very easily.

Q: How do you ensure that your course curriculum is up to date and meets industry requirements?

A: Having a word with a TPO to understand the Technical round question which was been asked to the students where they couldn’t answer I make sure I teach them all the parameters to clear issues. Even I try to compare my syllabus with top institutes of management and even online certification programs if I feel they are a gap I try to inherit those concepts in my syllabus.

Finally, last time I attended an FDP program which was conducted by AICTE for” bridging a gap between academics and industries”.In which I questioned the panel on how to excellence with these issues there have provided a few parameters for the same which I have started implementing in my current teaching methodology and syllabus settings.

I read many research articles to check the impact of the same whether we can meet our teaching criteria up to the industrial requirements.

Q: Is your college, receptive to innovation, technology, science & Entrepreneurship?How?Could you cite some examples of these?

A: Yes, our College is born with a Receptive to innovation as in Deccan Education Society’s Smt. Jayshree Sharadchandra Kothari Business School, we have a different specialization in which syllabus are been set based on innovative using current trends of technology for the same. As a management institute, we maintain equality with management, technology, science, and Enterperuship quality for the entire organization.

We have a Research lab, IBM Labs, and many more innovative certification programs like tableau, Sales, and Presentation Skills from Dale Carnegie, Financial modelling from Pro-school, and even this year we are planning for neuro-linguistic programming for our students.

On our campus each year we conduct National Conference. In which each faculty participate in the same with their research work.

Our institute also has a research committee that updated what we need to do for bringing more innovation to the campus at each level of specialization.

As for Enterpernuship few of the students are an entrepreneur for whom we conduct an interactive session with expert start-up firms during the guest session series on Saturdays.