Dr. G. Sasi Kumar is the Dean of the Student Affairs Department at GMR Institute Of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Production Engineering from Anna University, Chennai. He has a total of 37 years of teaching experience. He has published 27 research papers in national and international journals. He has attended a total of six training/ workshops/ seminars.

GMR Institute of Technology

You have held key positions at education institutes throughout your professional career. What are the key factors that keep you connected with the educational sector?

So first of all, I would like to thank you for allowing me to speak about our institute. I am currently holding the responsibility of Associate Dean of Student Affairs. So out of my total 23 years of experience span in various engineering colleges across India and Abroad, I have spent around 10 years of my career in the field of teaching. Afterward, I have been into administrative-related work, particularly serving the community of students. So the key factor that keeps me connected with the education sector is the opportunity to serve the betterment of students, particularly the rural sector, students from rural backgrounds lack self-confidence and communication skills, also most of them are below the poverty line. 

Being the Dean of GMRIT, what is your philosophy of leadership? How do you describe your leadership style?

As an Associate Dean of Student Affairs, my job responsibility is to take care of the entire students' welfare. So I need to move with different kinds of people like hostel, administrative team, faculty, coordinators of various professional bodies and clubs, then sports and games, and apart from that connecting with people is very important as understanding the psychology of students. And their mindset is very important. Otherwise, you know you cannot conduct your activities or you cannot justify your job. So my leadership stage is it is completely participative type. So I want to involve all my team members including student coordinators and faculty coordinators for every event so that we can achieve our task or achieve our goals through teamwork.

Being the Dean of GMRIT, how do you strategize about the key programs and plans for the marketing and administration of your college?

I would like to say normally to conduct any event or any process we need to have a very good plan. This is one thing and how it is being executed is also another very important thing. And strategy is nothing but how you are going to convert your plans into action, right? So in this

aspect, our strategy is mainly holistic development of students by involving the students in different bodies. Different academic bodies whether it may be student clubs or student councils or we have professional body chapters. So our strategy is nothing but involving students and identifying the hidden potential, potential, or hidden talent of every student and allowing them to enhance their skills. This is our main strategy.

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The education systems in India and other foreign countries are structured very differently. In your experience, what can an inbound student gain from studying here in your institute?

So actually the objective of GMR is preparing engineers today, I mean preparing tomorrow’s engineers today. So that is the objective of GMRIT so that from this you can easily understand. To meet our industrial, industrial expectations right from their graduation once the students step into the industry, our objective is to cater to the needs of the industry. So for that, we are having a lot of collaboration with many industries and we are providing a lot of training for our students to become good engineers of tomorrow. So what I can say is this is our differentiating factor. So we have well well-structured full semester internship program, then a summer internship program. All these programs will help the students understand the needs of the industry so that they can mold themselves to cater to the expectations of the industry. Apart from that, we have a lot of MOUs with foreign countries, particularly in UTP, Malaysia, and some of the other industries or other. We have tied up with other foreign universities, not only foreign universities, but some reputed institutions in and around India like IITs, NITs, etc. to offer some courses or some kind of internship in their universities so students will enjoy it. 

How does the curriculum of GMRIT ensure the best practice of the industry?

As I told you before, our curriculum is completely oriented toward the industry's expectations. So whatever the latest emerging technologies that are happening all over the industries, you know we are trying to keep those things in our curriculum. So I can say it is completely the amalgamation of industrial practices or whatever the teaching-learning process is happening. We are trying to ensure that it hugely helps the industry. 

What do you think your roles and responsibilities to the university and the students are?

Coming to my roles and responsibilities associated with student affairs, my primary job is to ensure that our campus is completely meant for the holistic development of students, apart from the regular academic curriculum. We aim to make our students realize the importance of value systems and lifelong learning, learning life skills along with their technical stuff. kind of grievances students grievances.