City students cold to space meet?
ISRO and ASI announced that they were going to hold scholarships to sponsor 50 students for the International Astronautical Congress 2007 which is going to be held in September 2007 in Hyderabad, India.
There was a report in today's media regarding the cold response that ISRO has recieved from Mumbai as compared to other parts of the country.
I'd like to write up an engineering student's defence for all those who are interested in space but did not apply.
When ISRO/ASI first announced their competition, students here were either completing their vivas or beginning their preparatory leave. Every engineering student knows that this is the time when engineering students start studying with focus on the exam. Before this, studying is either blocked by co-curricular activities or by the tons of assignments and experiments we have to write along with homework. Besides have ISRO/ASI's centres sent out posters highlighting this fact to city engineering colleges?
Even if they did send it, do you expect us to see it on college notice boards during our preparatory leave?
All, we have time for is studying. Doing 5-6 subjects in 3 weeks requires a lot of effort. Newspapers are another source of information. I do browse through the newspapers in the morning and I do not remember seeing an ad advertising the IAC Scholarship.
Amidst all these facts, how are interested students supposed to know about the IAC, much less the IAC Scholarship programme.
Our exams extend till June 13, 2007. So, even with a June 11 extension of the due date, you cannot expect many more entries unless they are students from science. I'd also like to know how many people from IIT-Bombay have applied for this meet? It has an aerospace department.
Laxman mentions that there were only 50 entries for the IAC Scholarship from the city so far. How many from the IIT?
I also would like to see how many Indian students go to the IAC besides the 50 sponsored ones because the cost of entry is pretty high for an Indian student to afford.
Posted at 09:13AM May 23, 2007 by Pradeep in Space in India | Comments[0]