Oldest engg school in country to conduct open house for aspirants
Chennai: Survey School, the oldest engineering school established outside Europe, in Madras in 1794 to produce trained personnel in surveying for British India, has turned into a premier College of Engineering (CEG), Guindy.
It took British engineers, their surveyors, ameens, and draftsmen 50 years to complete the first survey of India in 1852. With satellite images and modern equipment, the same can be completed within a year with much better accuracy today.
It all started with survey engineering. Now, the college is producing top-notch engineers in multiple disciplines. The department of civil engineering, one of the first departments to be established in the college roughly 166 years ago, has become one of the premier departments of the discipline.
"Our department will host a first-ever open house on Monday to showcase innovations, research outcomes, and project demonstrations by students and faculty members," said S Kanmani, head, department of civil engineering, CEG. It is open to industry professionals, researchers, alumni, school children, and the public to see cutting-edge laboratories, interact with researchers, and witness live demonstrations.
"The event will also have interactive exhibits, student-led models, and solutions to real-world infrastructure and sustainability challenges," she added.
This exercise is being conducted to promote its UG and PG programmes.
The department is offering BE civil engineering in Tamil and English and BE in geo-informatics. It also offers 11 PG courses. The students trained in live projects are working for various govt departments and agencies, including NASA and ISRO.
"Three students from the BE geo-informatics course – Latha Malar Baskaran, Suresh Vannan, and G G Ponnurangam are working in NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory as scientists.
One of them was involved in the project that brought Astronaut Sunita Williams," said R Vidhya, director of Institute of Remote Sensing, another centre of the civil engineering department.
"All faculty members in the civil engineering department are experts in their domains.
They do research and consultancy for various govt agencies. So, UG and PG students joining this department can branch out to any section of civil engineering and work on live projects as well," said R Saravanan, director, Centre for Water Resources, also part of the civil engineering department at CEG. "Any building structure-related issue, be it Mugalivakkam or Tirvottiyur, our faculty members are part of the expert team.
Due to these consultancy services, we are generating 80% of consultancy revenue for Anna University," said professor K P Jaya, head, structural engineering division, department of civil engineering. "It's one of the largest departments and occupies 60% of the total area in the CEG," she added.
About 50% of total students are placed in campus placements, while 30% opt to write competitive exams. "The remaining 20% of students are interested in pursuing higher studies," Kanmani said. Some of the PG courses, such as structural engineering, have 100% placements.
"ME in soil mechanics and foundation engineering course started at CEG in 1958, much before the IITs," said professor M Muttharam from the soil mechanics and foundation division.
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