How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Administrators at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU have begun exploring the possibility of academic collaboration with Indian universities.
During a five-day trip to India two weeks ago, NYU-Poly President Jerry Hultin and Meera Kumar, NYU-Poly's vice president of communications and marketing, attended the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry Higher Education Summit in New Delhi, where Hultin participated in a panel discussing how academia could partner with both private companies and public sectors in India.
"India feels that it hasn't done too well in how the public sector and private sector can work together in academia," Kumar said. "They felt America has done a very good job with that, so they wanted Jerry to speak about his experience and how it has done so well in the United States."
Hultin and Kumar visited the campus of Delhi Technological University and met with some of the school's administrators and faculty, with whom they discussed the possibility of research collaboration and student exchange between NYU-Poly and DTU. Last spring, NYU-Poly offered a similar program in collaboration with the Manipal Institute of Technology, where four NYU-Poly students studied abroad.
NYU-Poly sophomore Vincent Yee, who was among the students who studied at ManipalTech, said international educational opportunities are beneficial because they expose students to different learning environments and lifestyles and also provide benefits for the school itself.
"NYU-Poly is seen as a pretty big international school, and international collaboration might show it to other schools and show how great it is," Yee said.
Harold Sjursen, an industry professor of philosophy at NYU-Poly, has been conducting collaborative research with Indian professors. Sjursen said international education provides a special advantage for engineering and high technology majors.
"American students working in high-tech fields will be working in a multinational environment," Sjursen said.
According to Iraj Kalkhoran, NYU-Poly's associate provost of undergraduate academics, an academic relationship with India would be bolstered by the similarities between Indian and American educational structures in technology.
"India is one of the few countries where engineering and science curricula matches the U.S. better than other countries," Kalkhoran said. "Engineering and technology are so rigid; it's hard to deviate from the curriculum."
Kumar said that though NYU-Poly is currently only in an "exploratory" phase of developing stronger academic relationships with Indian universities, the initiative is a significant one.
He said: "It's a very global world, and it's a good idea to get a global perspective on what's happening in India."
