Teuku Aulia Gempana: The Intelligence and Ethics Of The Students In India

THE INTELLIGENCE AND ETHICS OF THE STUDENTS IN INDIA
Teuku Aulia Geumpana
BINUS UNIVERSITY International

Global Engineering Week
Last April, I had the opportunity to visit Chitkara University – Himachal Pradesh, India, as a Visiting Lecturer. Chitkara University is located in Chandigarh, a city in northern India which became the capital of two provinces: Punjab and Haryana. The city is also known as "The City Beautiful”.

This visit is part of a series of Global Engineering Week (GEW) organized by Chitkara University. For one week, I taught Cloud Computing to the students of the third year of the School of Engineering & Information Technology.

At first, I did not feel confident to give IT-themed lectures in India. Many global enterprises outsource their IT projects to India indicating the strength of India’s IT workforce. However, I decided to accept the invitation in order to challenge myself.

Learning from Experience
Aside from Indonesia, several lecturers came from Australia, China, Finland, France, Malaysia and Scotland. They have specialized knowledge in various fields of Engineering & IT. On the first day, along with other visiting lecturers, we were warmly greeted by the staff and university officials in a simple meal in one of the rooms of Chitkara Himachal Pradesh campus. Ms. Sangeet Jaura, Associate Vice President of International Affairs, asked us to share our experiences from our parts of the world with the students, to enrich their students learning. This way they can see how the learning concepts are applied in different real world context.

Class Atmosphere
When I entered the classroom, the students stood and greeted me “good morning”. I smiled and responded the same. This was different from lecturing in Indonesia. Another unique class experience is that when asked questions, students always reply with long answers and examples, even if the question is quite straight forward. No answer such as "I don’t know", although sometimes the answer given is not the one I was expecting. The students are not afraid to attempt and they are eager to participate.

My first day went really well, and as the days passed, the enthusiasm of the students to ask questions and give feedback kept growing. They were full of clever ideas and creative opinions of the students. It reminds me of a very inspiring quote from the former president of India DR. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam:

"Thinking is progress. Non-thinking is stagnation of the individual, organization and the country. Thinking leads to action. Knowledge without action is useless and irrelevant. Knowledge with action, converts adversity into prosperity ".

On the last day, during break, I chatted with some students. The majority of them originate from the province of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana , all neighboring provinces. Many of them claimed that it was their first time learning about cloud computing and many seemed to enjoy my class which gave me great pleasure and satisfaction. Teaching in India is an experience that I will not forget. Polite, respectful, intellectual, creative and expressive are all qualities that make up the learning ethnics of the Indian university students I met. We can all learn something from them.