Sharing a Bit of Guidance for the Younger Parents of IIT Aspirant Kids

Sharing a Bit of Guidance for the Younger Parents of IIT Aspirant Kids

A few days back, I got a call on my intercom around 8:00 PM. I picked up the phone, and on the other side was a 6th-grade student from our apartment complex; I will call him Rohan for this article. Rohan was talking in fluent English in a very clear-sounding voice. He said he wanted some guidance from me. The first question I asked him was, what do you see when you grow big. I am an IIT aspirant, replied he. I invited him to my unit the next day at 2:00 PM.

Rohan was on the dot and promptly came with a notebook and pencil to take notes. He was bold enough to visit me alone. I offered him a seat in my home office. After exchanging a couple of general questions and answers about his school and family, he said, I have heard from my teacher that these days the IIT preparations start from the 6th-grade itself, so my parents have sent me to you for some guidance.?

Coming back to Rohan, the first piece of my advice to him was that you are a Choturam, still a kid. Do?NOT spoil your childhood. In 6th and 7th grade, you keep a good general reading and concentrate on all the subjects taught in your school. From 8th or 9th grade, you can take some focused coaching if at all there is a need. Rohan was already attending the best available school in South Bangalore, known for its outstanding academic focus. Then he asked about some Ed-tech companies offering App-based (software-based) self-learning. I categorically told him that kids better learn from a real teacher face-to-face at his age. My only advice to him was to enjoy his childhood for the next two years and return to me when he was in 8th grade with his parents. I offered him some ice cream and a couple of mythology-based comics to read. He promised me to come back after two months to report his progress.

Currently, I reside in an apartment complex in South Bangalore, where most of the families are very well-to-do. Nowadays, the younger generation (of parents) is usually shy to visit others to socialize; it is clearly a dark shadow of the so-called Western culture. Many of them have school-going kids, and not surprisingly, most are IIT aspirants under the influence of their parents. I am no different. Recently my daughter prepared for IIT entrance, and my younger son is actively working on it. In this connection, I have been doing significant research on this topic for the past couple of years. So I thought of sharing my experience with others.

I observe the trend these days; younger parents push their children to IIT coaching or coding classes from 5th or 6th grade onwards. It is mainly influenced by heavily targeted advertising by coaching classes and Ed-tech companies. Pushing a 5th grader to coding classes sounds ridiculous to me. Parents better provide the young kids of this age with the resources like toolkits with a set of spanners, screwdrivers, and carpentry tools and encourage them to be creative with them. I notably provided my ten-year-old son with a professional-grade toolkit for general household plumbing and carpentry work. I also provided him with a precision toolkit to work with watches,?mobile phones, notebook computers, and other household appliances. I invested heavily in buying him expensive Lego sets of all kinds and encouraged him to create new models. And my son did better than I expected. Now at 14, he is utterly hands-on with these tools. He single-handedly does all household plumbing and carpentry jobs and even repairs his laptop computer and all our mobile phones. He can replace the battery of an iPhone, a very specialized job which otherwise needs a visit to Apple Customer Care.

Along with these skills, he has also mastered computer and mobile hardware and many coding and software development skills. I never did a single sitting with him to teach him any of these things, nor did I send him to any classes to learn these things. He has learned everything on his own – mainly with the help of YouTube videos and reading the service manuals on the internet. The only service I did to him was this – whenever he came to me with any doubt, I resolved it very sincerely, to the best of my ability. Kids are usually curious, and it's their super strength. We should always encourage and add to their curiosity. Einstein, when at the peak of his science career, once said, "I have no special skills or superior intelligence. The only skill I have is that I am passionately curious."

Here it is not that I am praising how great my son is. My point here is that if you provide your kids with proper resources and encouragement, they can do wonders without any intervention from your side.

Now coming back to the IIT aspiration of most kids in India, the IIT entrance examination, in my opinion, is very brutal. For example, my daughter Neha, 19, did prepare for JEE Mains day and night, like 14 to 16 hrs a day. She worked hard and could secure a 97.6?percentile score, translating to around 25,000 all-India ranks. This result was in her fourth attempt. That year JEE mains was conducted four times in the same academic year. It was her best, and even with two more shots, she could not have done better than this. She was practically not getting any decent NIT or branch at this performance. All she was offered was some XYZ branch in some remote colleges. Obviously, she was not interested. Her extracurricular record was excellent to her luck, which helped her crack the IIM Ranchi IPM entrance exam for five years integrated MBA. So my advice to the parents is, alongside tech colleges, please do not forget to apply for these five years of integrated MBA programs. IIM Indore, IIM Ranchi, IIM Roharak, IIM Bodhgaya, and IIM Jammu are currently offering this course. NALSAR Hyderabad, Nirma Institute in Ahamadabad, and Manipal University in Karnataka are good options for five years of integrated programs. By the way, NALSAR is known for its law major but has a full-fledged management department offering five years of IPM.

All students are not wired to go into IITs, and they need not be. JEE attracts more than 150,000 aspirants, so the competition is very high and unreasonable. There are many other private engineering colleges in India which are equally good. Many of these institutes conduct entrance exams that are easier to crack than the brutal JEE. And interestingly, students from these private colleges fetch similar placements and salaries to IITs. So practically, you lose nothing. BITS Pilani, MIT Manipal, VIT Vellore, and a few other regional private colleges are worth considering.

I want to close this article by adding if you can manage, it's a better option to send your children to the US for an MS + PhD. If that is not an option, an MBA from the top twenty colleges of India or top colleges from around the globe will be a good option. These options offer a better work-life than becoming a plain software coder. However, it's a personal choice. For post-graduation abroad, the countries like Germany, France, and a few others in Europe can be viable options.??These countries do not charge tuition fees in many public institutions, even for international students. And even then, the quality of education is excellent. In Germany, INR 70,000 to 80,000 per month is the expenditure in such institutions, which goes mainly into living expenses. Quality education can be the key to a promising career and a decent life, so it may not be ignored under any circumstances…. I am your Friend, Shailendra Kadre, from Bangalore. I am reachable at [email protected].