I am very interested in the future of higher education.
I have learnt much more outside of the classroom than inside, and this was truest when I was a student. I want to stick around in higher education because I want to try and change this for everybody in college today.
Change it through two ways:
- Make classes more interesting than they were back in my day. Also make them more interesting than the typical run-of-the-mill classroom experience today. (This is a hard problem, it requires hard work and it does not scale. But learning how to teach better is an invaluable experience.)
- Help change college into something more than drab old sit-in-class for six hours a day, six days a week. What a horrible way to learn!
This current semester, I want to try and get as many projects off the ground as possible. This has meant getting some BSc students started on projects of their own, it has meant involving some of them in work I am currently engaged in, and it has meant trying to get some workshops going.
Some of these things will stick, and grow into something much larger than just my involvement. Others will fail. That’s ok. This semester is about trying out new things.
One of these things is a podcast.
I had tried this out in 2019 (link here), completely as a solo effort, but I got only five episodes in. 2020 is a mess I’d rather forget. And now, in 2021, we’re back with another season of Back to College.
What is Back to College?
The idea is simple: speak to people about how they would approach college differently, if they got the chance to do it all over again.
- What would you do more of, what would you do less of?
- What technologies that are available today would have been a blessing, and how could they also have been a curse?
- Is bunking a science or an art? How should you choose which classes to bunk, and which to not – and why?
- How would you have built out networks better?
- Would you give exams the same importance with the benefit of hindsight? Why or why not?
- Which books helped you?
- How overrated are textbooks, or are they not? Why?
- What in your current job are you able to do well because of what you learnt in college?
- What in your current job makes you wish you had been taught differently in college?
- … and the list goes on and on and on.
We’re beginning with Gokhale alumni, and we’ll add more folks in as we go along. But the idea is to build a repository of interviews for folks to listen to, any time, to get an idea about the careers they want to get into.
And this time around, it ain’t a solo effort. I have the energy of youth on my side! Praneet, Rahul, Vaishnavi, Simran, Shashank, Jay, Anshi, Nivida and Amogh are helping me out on this project, and the hope is that eventually, this will become a completely student run thing.
New episodes will be up every Friday, and we have two out already. Neha Sinha spoke with me about public policy, and Binoy Mascarenhas and I chatted about urbanization. In each case, of course, I touched upon some of the questions above. This Friday will be a conversation I had with Rohith Jyothish on understanding the ‘P’ in GIPE.
Please do give it a listen, and to all the GIPE alumni reading this, please – pretty please! – don’t hesitate to reach out if you think you would like to be on the podcast. We’ll set up a time at your convenience. (Non-GIPE folks, same offer applies to you in about a couple of months. I’ll do another post then).
Thank you, as always, for reading – and now for listening too!
EconForEverybody 
Thanks a lot!
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