I am Sindhu Krishnan an Assistant Professor in this esteemed institution of VSIT pursuing my passion of teaching / imparting life skills to a small yet crucial set of GEN Z that can play a significant role in the future of this great country.
As I stated briefly, my passion is learning and transferring the learning to the needed set of target group that has the time & scope to make use and impact the society at large.
I belong to a conservative, orthodox, humble middle class family of 3 children where the one and only goal or aspiration of the parent is to earn just enough to make sure their children get good education beside the minimal basic necessities. They had kept aside all their personal ambitions, aspirations, worldly pleasures as price to pay as a bargain.
As I grew up and started realizing this little or more over a period of time, I have also chosen to cut down on my playfulness or the trivial fun that any of my friends / fellow class mates had the luxury to indulge in. I have accepted the fact that they may not be able to understand nor do I want to showcase the reality back home and solicit their feeling. If this is the price, I pay besides giving up my childhood / teen fun or routines, so be it.
In this process I managed to study through various aided institutions patronized by those like the VSIT Promoters, with the help of scholarships and turned out to be a Good Samaritan and academician.
I personally feel I have made my parents proud. They feel accomplished for the compromises that brought me up during many odds besides letting their crucial youth years go by working hard and caring for me.
Through this career I have worked through some of the reputed institutions:
a. Anna Adarsh College for women, Punjabi Charitable Trust Institute
b. RMK Engineering College, one of the TOP 3 Ranking Engineering College under Anna University
c. VSIT (now)
Besides teaching in mainstream colleges, I have a high sense of passion for training, particularly training on soft skills. I had seen many bright students not getting placed despite being good at academics when I was part of the placement cell. Hence, I decided on training these students on the skills that made them confident.
In my endeavor to make contribution to the GEN Z on this front, I decided to go back to learning and took a break from working to get trained by Cambridge University on these skill sets and turned out to be an outstanding student of the batch earning accolades and rewards.
With these additional skills, I managed to make immense impact to the social skills of the students and played an active part in improving the placement scores. At some point, I realized that doing this only at my place workplace is confining the skills to a small set of audience. Hence, I reached out to my management and taken special permission to do such special training to other educational institutions and help them to get certified by Cambridge University. This gave great deal of satisfaction to me personally and unparalleled appreciation to the Institution.
From there my sense of learning and transferring that learning has never looked down till date and I do my best not to miss out on any opportunity that could come handy to my profession and passion.
Besides the Cambridge University certified trainer, some of the trainings that I shall feel proud for having taken part and consider myself fortunate includes:
a. Infosys
b. AIMA
c. IIT Chennai
d. TCS
I also consider a professor has a significant role in shaping the life of a student as he / she spend great part of his / her life in the instates confines. Here they could befriend a good / nice set of kids or otherwise and they may end up idolizing a good professor / lecturer or other way round. Therefore, as a teacher I have a big responsibility of demonstrating and displaying the right traits and attributes to be sure that I do not set wrong example.
Also being someone with higher levels of maturity and experience I also consider I have a big role in being a mentor. For me to be an effective mentor, I firstly need to become a good friend to the students genuinely. I had to gain the trust of the students where they are confident that I am genuine.
I would reckon I have achieved partial success in this and need to work further harder. This is highly crucial because as a friend the student may be able to share all the personal issues that they may not be comfortable sharing with their parents at home. Whereas a professor can navigate the student to the right decisions or actions that can potentially solve his or her problem.
To sum it up, I take lot of pride in being a life coach to so many of the GEN Z and would strive to improve on the same continuously besides honing my skills to connect with them outside the classroom settings.
With this, I would like to quote “Success is when your signature turns into autograph" – I am marching towards it.
