Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore conducted its 36th annual convocation virtually on Tuesday, September 28, 2021. Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi, the director of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras took part in the convocation as chief guest and delivered the convocation address virtually.
In his speech, Prof Ramamurthi urged students to dive deep into at least some of the subjects, if not all, during their formal education and learn how to get to the core of the concepts involved in them.
“To use a familiar Indian description, one should aim for vidwath in at least a few subjects. But how do we know which ones to do this in, which subjects are likely to be useful in one’s career? Well, one cannot know this, and the curious thing is, it does not matter. What the effort itself does, irrespective of the subject, is to teach one how to delve deep, how to know when one has understood the core underlying concepts well, and how to recognise when one is slowly but surely becoming a vidwaan,” he said.
Delivering his address, the founder and chancellor of Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Dr G Viswanathan said that out of the eligible 14 crore youth in India, only 4 crore get the opportunity to go for higher education. Listing out the challenges in higher education, Dr Viswanathan said that shortage of teachers, low input for research, and inadequate industry linkages had made India lag behind other countries like Japan, China, South Korea.
A total of 7,569 undergraduate, postgraduate students, and research scholars graduated this year.
