— Lakshmi Yazhini
“Hello! Where do you study?”
“IIT Madras”
“Wow, that’s amazing! Such a prestigious institute. Which course?”
“An MA Integrated in Development/English Studies, from the Humanities department”
“What? An MA in IIT? Never heard of that. And what is this about Humanities?”
Not sure about the rest of the HS student body, but this is what every conversation I have with a relative/friend outside of IITM looks like. Thankfully, pretty soon no one of our age shall be subject to this awkward scrutiny, not because our course is going to be more recognized, but because the upcoming HS freshers are no longer going to be UG students.
The MA Integrated Program, having been offered by DoHSS since 2006 at the UG level, has been restructured into purely an MA program at the PG level and will be operational from 2023. After 2022, our course will no longer be offered as an Integrated program, but as merely a Master of Arts in DS/ES/Economics, which anybody from various fields of UG experience could take up, thereby attracting a more diverse student body, according to the administration. As HS kids who call deadlines a social construct and prefer Marx over marks, a lot of us definitely have something to say about this.
Did we see it coming?
Definitely not.
Several students (including most of my well-informed seniors) claimed that although they had come across talks of major changes in the course structure/outlook, they did not expect it to be discontinued. A few of them assumed that it was regarding allocating streams from the first year (like with the case of HS22) or that they were considering re-offering Economics as a major. Regardless, it can be safe to assume that a large number of students were disappointed that they were not kept in the loop or involved in the whole process.
“We got to know about the Senate meeting’s verdict via a meme page, and not through anybody else in our own department,” a student claimed.
How do we feel?
Some of us definitely feel worried about the functioning of intra-departmental bodies and career prospects. Worries over the possible non-existence of a specific Departmental Placement Team for the remaining batches of the Integrated Program have been expressed. There are also those who feel sad that interactions with members of future batches might not be as rich as it currently is, and that the limited interaction we have with our alumni (major missing: random email threads about favourite songs/movies) might soon be extinguished. Many people of senior batches do claim that they are slightly indifferent to these changes because it majorly does not affect them. A very tiny section of the HS population feels that restructuring was not a bad idea on the whole, because currently the course is too wide and interdisciplinary, making its scope too large and the overall experience very abstract and theoretical.
The question of RG….?
If MA students at the PG level were to take up a few courses with us, would they perform better than us? (Or in Insti lingo: RG us?) Several students think that this possibility might not be so bad/visible if students from the Integrated Program were 4th or 5th years (since they are practically PG students themselves anyway). However, if most of the other MA students are from a background of Humanities and they take up classes with the 2nd or 3rd years, there are possibilities of intense competition. Regardless of these miniscule possibilities, not many students are worried about the same because they are confident about the familiarity of the HS pedagogy when it comes to students of the Integrated Program (owing to the greater amount of time they have spent in the department).
And what of our legacy?
Dead Poets Society.
DoHSS Film Club.
Article 19.
Wonderful and fun filled spaces of the department which make the “HS bond” (as labelled by a few techies I know) very unique. A handful of students in the department seem to think that incoming PG students might not exactly perpetuate these elements of our UG culture as enthusiastically as we do. They might be more academically involved in the department than we are and might not find enough time in those busy 4 semesters to do so. There is also the fact that very soon, the Insti cultural scene might not have as much of a HS presence as it does now.
“Most clubs have a learning curve to be able to handle the mess of Insti administration/logistics for conducting an event and two years is too short.” – a student of HS GSB.
Which brings us to one last (read: nostalgic) question:
What will Insti miss?
As of now, in the huge web of PoRs, you can find at least one HS person in almost every niche (especially in several Saarang PoRs), even across multiple non-cultural PoRs like CFI, E-Cell, Shaastra, etc. The overall cultural sphere of Insti might not take a massive hit (though I’m sure a lot of us would like to be dramatic and think it would), but the relative carrying forward of cultural skills/elements from high school by HS students (compared to techies) would be missed. Moreover, a large number of students seem to think that the availability of a one-of-a-kind interactive discourse between UG students of technical and humanities backgrounds would be lost.
“It diversifiés the learning culture and exposes the students to a variety of skills and courses instead of restricting knowledge only within engineering,”
“Most IITs aren’t known for social science research but the presence of electives do make some of the tech courses more interdisciplinary rather than vice versa.”
“These interactions help both techies and HS students gain insights and understand things from a different perspective.”
I feel that one of the very first things we learn upon entering this department is that there are different perspectives to every concept in this world (and no, I’m not just talking about those first semester courses, but also in general). Neither is the functioning of our department going to be discontinued, nor is there going to be less scope for perspective oriented learning. But what we feel about our program, our culture, our HS family and our legacy is ours to feel; and our perspective to share.
Edited by Devika Dinesh
Design by Alphin Tom
Article 19 