Coffee with Feeds: Director Diaries 1

Team Feeds brings to you Coffee with Feeds, to remind NITT about the Director who has metamorphosed our college in five years. As he nears the end of his tenure, we release these titbits from over the years of his replies for various questions posed to him by students.

How did you get into Mechanical Engineering?
Every incident that’s occurred in my life was accidental. I come from a family where I am the seventh generation of engineers. My forefathers were all civil engineers.(I even have the survey books from that time – 1870s). All my brothers and I jointly entered Mechanical Engineering for no specific reason. We didn’t have any plan beforehand to do so. But later on, after entering into this branch I’d found out that Mechanical engineers were “the jack of all trades but the specialist of none” ; we are able to fit in whichever way is required – we are “mouldable”.
After Mechanical engineering I went into Industrial Metallurgy (I’d applied for an M.Tech at IIT Madras in Machine Tools, Industrial Metallurgy and lastly a Management degree and under the guidance of my professor chose the second option)
You see, this applies to any Mechanical Engineer – starting with Mechanical he can get into Computer Science or Simulation or Control Engineering.
Still later on, you’ll come across a Mechanical engineer fighting a Materials Engineer because the design of a product involves quality and economic issues. So having the knowledge of both proved to be a strategic advantage for me and it made me rise quite quickly in my career. This is true for any mechanical engineer who has “double qualification” in any area and thus has control over a wider scope of processes.
But Mechanical engineering had been sent to the background of my life’s picture because afterwards I’d taken up missile engineering and its management. Such situations exist in everybody’s life, no?