IITBHF and IITBAA (http://www.iitbombay.org)

Famed school's degrees open few Canadian doors

By Marina Jimenez

Globe and Mail - April 23, 2004
© Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts from article - the full text is in copies of Globe and Mail on the newsstand.

Graduate of Indian engineering college wants it to have Harvard's cachet

When Rabiz Foda shops for groceries, he knows the exact total of his bill before the cashier rings it in. When he plays bridge, he just can't help it: He counts cards. If you wake him up in the middle of the night, he can instantly tell you the square root of three (1.7321) and pi to the fourth digit (3.1416). Mr. Foda, 52, comes by his love affair with numbers, algorithms and complex mathematical equations honestly. He was born in Bombay, India. And he is a graduate of IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), a celebrated engineering college recently described by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes as the most important university in the world that you have never heard of, with more brain power than Harvard, MIT and Princeton put together.

The school is famous enough to have made its way into the satirical comic strip Dilbert, where an IIT alumnus was described as "mentally superior to most people on earth." Yet in Canada, the value of an IIT graduate degree still doesn't resonate as much to the frustration of the engineers and high-tech gurus who immigrate here expecting to be received as enthusiastically as they are in California's Silicon valley, only to end up working at Tim Hortons. A nuclear engineer who arrived in Toronto more than a year ago is doing door-to-door sales.

Mr. Foda aims to change all this. He also took menial jobs when he first came to Canada but today is a senior project engineer at Marshall Mackin Monaghan in Toronto. He wants to establish IIT as a brand name with the cachet of a Harvard MBA.

Tomorrow, more than 400 IIT alumni will gather in Toronto with Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis, and business and community leaders to showcase the school's talent; keynote speakers include Malay Mukherjee, an IIT graduate and president of Ispat International in Britain, and Dezso Horvath, Dean of York University's School of Business.

"We have a great brand image in the U.S. and all over the world. In Canada, the recognition is lacking," says Mr. Foda, president of IIT Alumni Canada.

"The U.S. is definitely more open and internationally minded, and the industries there have spread their wings far and wide. Canada is a little slow to pick up on trends. Why not be the leaders instead of following the U.S.?"

...

In the U.S., high-tech and engineering firms, and even investment banks, have been quick to accept the credentials and expertise of LIT grads, many of whom have helped to propel the U.S. technology revolution. Prominent graduates include Rajat Gupta, managing director of consulting firm McKinsey and Co.; Gururaj Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks, as well as the senior vice-chairman of a New York bank, and the founder of Sun Microsystems.

Bill Gates was the keynote speaker last year at the school's golden jubilee celebration in Silicon Valley, where lIT engineers have been ivolved in 10 per cent of information-technology startups. In Canada, UT grads have made me inroads, especially in academia. Mohan Mater, former Dean of Engineering at the University of Western Ontario, is an alumnus, and so are several prominent businesspeople, and the current and past Indian consuls in Toronto.

Yet many manufacturing research and engineering firms have been slower to appreciate the potential of some the world's most entrepreneurial brains. IIT was founded in 1951 by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, modeled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with seven campuses across the country. Many students begin preparing to sit the entrance exams in high school and only about 2,000 are accepted every year. The government subsidizes the $3,000 (U.S.) tuition. An article in Salon magazine describes the school's graduates as "flexible and brilliant technological knowledge workers who easily cross borders and cultures to pursue their entrepreneurial and employment dreams." The Nagrares hope they won't have to cross another border to pursue their dreams.

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