Explaining the IIT Brand to a 11 yo Kid

All attempts to get my 11 yo daughter to indicate which profession would interest her get us nowhere – “I am too young to think about such things”, she will announce very sagely. Such wisdom is reserved only for such occasions, sadly.

 

If she won’t pick one, we’ll pick one for her, we decided like true blood Indian parents. And our pick is engineering. Obviously. No, not just because both of us are engineers. The pay for engineers on average is between decent to good. Engineering courses are cheaper than almost all other professional courses. Engineering degrees are valid across the globe, unlike say medical or law degrees. And the world will always need engineers.

 

Of course, once you start on the engineering path, the goal becomes IIT for all Indians. At which our daughter would shrug, “What is IIT? What makes it so great?”. Obviously, she’s too young to understand that.

 

My wife tries explaining to her that the branded colleges get you jobs on campus, while the rest have to go for walk-ins, wait in long queues and struggle for that first job. IIT is the premium brand of engineering colleges, she added. The kid didn’t get it. More likely, she didn’t care.

 

Never one to give up, we sent her to one of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) focussed schools in Bangalore. Since that branch of the school was proving to be too long a commute, we tried applying for the other branch closer to home this year.

 

During the entrance test at that other branch, the invigilator was flipping through the applications, turned to my daughter all impressed, “Your dad went to IIT?”. The penny dropped. My daughter now gets it that IIT must be great. “Why do you say so?”, I asked. “Teachers at my school aren’t impressed by anything anybody does”, she said, “But if even they are impressed by IIT, it must mean something”.

 

Yet another reason I love her school – they have successfully conveyed the value of an IIT degree even to Miss “I am too young to think about such things”.

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