Scale up strategies?

[Jaineel Aga]

Hello all,

 

Its been quite some time that we all decided to something about the education system in India and so was formed  this group by a diverse set of passionate people  wanting to bring about change. However, the "change" will only come about if we reach some sort of scale.

 

Previously on this forum as well as at the meeting in NYC, I remember we were discussing if there is a need to have some sort of structure? Some sort of a goal for this group. We spoke about going to our own alma maters. What is the count till date from when this Idea was floated? If most of us are abroad, how many people have  each one of us reached out? What other avenues are we contemplating?  If members of this forum are actively participating in some mentoring, can we create a case study  for each person (without naming mentees if they wish) so that we are not reinventing the wheel and which could be handy reading material for our future mentees.

 

Do we have a long term strategy? Do we have any accountability? Who are the officers of this forum and what are their duties? I am sorry to be sounding like somenone out of a organizational management book but I think this is important for scalability. Please provide your feedback, maybe i have missed the point and achieving scale may not even be this group's goal?

 

Now one of my experiences:

 

Over the last two months I have been in Bangalore working for a microfinance institution. A number of the field staff who work here although educated come from rural backgrounds and find it hard to compete for difficult and competitive entrance exams. There was one such field staff who was at the head office for training. He was soon going to take his entrance exam for  a college of rural management and he approached me to help him out with some math problems ( the typical CAT/GRE/ GMAT types) that you have in these nerve wrecking entrance exams. I was helping him out, solving a few sums everyday and it was a great to know that being an engineer actually had advantages.

 

The interesting part came in when he got his niece from a small town in Karnataka to talk to me. She was preparing for her engineering CET which is coming up sometime now. Even with the language barrier ( they don't speak Hindi and I dont speak Kannada) we somehow managed to talk in English. Now the shocking part:

 

One month for the exam to go, the poor girl is struggling with the conics section and she wanted to know how to find the focus of a parabola ( which was a multiple choice question in one of her practice tests). Any of us who have gone through math/ science in 11 and 12 know that this is a VERY VERY  basic question. Y^2 = 4AX is the standard form of a parabola passing through the origin symmetric about the x axis and X^2 = 4AY is symmetric about the the Y axis. How do I explain this concept to her who has an exam in a month but does not even know what a parabola looks like ?

 

I had to draw analogies with the crescent moon and make her imagine a lake's surface etc ( it was over the phone and that girl had no net access where i could send her some material). I  asked her why she wasn't  asking her teachers in school but to my dismay I  later find out that for a class of 150 students there is one teacher and he cannot possibly answer  more than one question per student in the short break they have.I felt very helpless and  pissed that  the girl who  was making such an effort  to  get into an engineering college  had no one to teach her? Would helping someone like this be within our scope?

 

I know we have decided to stay away from Rural India for many logistical reasons.. but if there are some like me who have returned back to India and want to take this to the next level now would be a time to speak up. Views please?? Anyone think this is important? Is this in our scope? Do we have a scope? A plan?

Regards

 

 

Jaineel Aga
Master of Engineering Management, Duke '08
B.E (Electronics), Mumbai University ' 07
jaine...@gmail.com
India (Mumbai) Number - 9833855968
India (Bangalore) Number - 9663382590
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jaineel

[Vijay]

hi jaineel, good to hear from you. thanks for note about your
experiences. it was a pretty heartbreaking story, really. you did a
great job, given the circumstances. you've raised a whole bunch of
issues and concerns that many of us share. i hear your restlessness.

so here's an update on what i've been doing: i've begun mentoring
work. i put one of the first people to get in touch with us with a
network of business specialists, i speak to another kid from time to
time about sports journalism, but he's busy with his finals now. (that
reminds me, i should wish him for his exams.) i've also started
speaking to a 16-year-old kid in chennai about her writing on an
almost day-to-day basis. she got in touch with me a couple of months
ago on orkut; she'd been searching for chennai-based journalists to
ask for some advice about writing careers. i was the only one to
respond, apparently. given my background i think i'm fairly well
placed to give concrete suggestions about this area. as is the case
with many indian kids, she is enormously talented, but needs access to
the right kind of cultural capital to succeed. i'm not sure how many
writers we have in our group, but until further notice, i'd be glad to
help her out.

we've formed a connection easily enough; she's a very smart kid and i
keep up with her on her academic progress as well. i suggested that
she apply to liberal arts universities in the US for an undergraduate
degree but as i'd expected, her parents felt she ought to finish her
degree in India, and i didn't push it. this was really in the spirit
of making ambitious suggestions -- take 'em or leave 'em. btw the
question i posed the other day -- how much of one's own personality
should one reveal to a mentee -- was in this context, and still holds:
i'm hoping to hear from you folks at some stage.

to address your first point, jaineel, it's not as if folks have
forgotten about their commitment to this idea of a knowledge
collective. i think TII is a good idea, and has great potential. the
question is not whether folks are contributing to TII on a day-to-day
basis but whether they can chip in when someone writes for help. most
of these people live abroad, and will hopefully get to speak at their
schools when they reopen in june. for example, i'm planning to speak
at both my old schools when i go back home this june. there are some
who have said they aren't comfortable with the idea of public speaking
but i'm sure they'd make good contacts and many-to-one mentors (a
crucial role that anshul has defined elsewhere). these people have an
important role to play too.

at the same time, i suspect very few have actually looked around to
see if anyone needs shaping, and that's one thing that our folks must
consider as a responsibility. but i'm not inclined to hold that
against them; folks ought to find the motivation within themselves, at
their own pace. simultaneously we have to work towards broadening our
base and reaching out to talented young people based in india --
people like you, jaineel -- with an active interest in public service.
we do not dilute our network at any cost; irresponsible mentors would
do our cause a lot of harm. our colleague akhila venkatachalam is
slacking off at the moment on this (i'm kidding, she's in boston,
slogging away at her phd), but she's got some ideas on mentoring,
accountability, and the supply side of this process. there is also
aarti ramaswami, who is busy with dissertation work at the moment, but
has excellent ideas on psychology and organization. i hope they will
have some interesting contributions to make over the next few years.
this really is a long-term commitment, not an idea that should lose
steam in a few months. the focus should constantly be on widening our
core base of mentors, so eventually we'll get a steady dialogue going
on these pages.

which brings us to the next issue: personally, at the moment i don't
see myself getting involved in grassroots-level rural work, partly
because i'm in the US, and also because i believe there are some very
capable people doing effective work in rural areas. i'm invested in
slowly transforming the urban middle class myself, people who can make
optimal use of my experiences and insights. at the moment my
involvement is restricted to speaking to individuals. that doesn't
mean this is an ineffective process. i believe in starting small,
learning from these initial test experiences. mentoring -- like
parenting -- is a hugely complex process. mistakes will be made, but
these will almost never be irrevocable, irredeemable errors. help
shape a few people, who in turn will be able to have a positive impact
on the life experiences of their friends, who will go on to transform
others, so on and so forth. we laid out the agenda at the brunch
meeting in nyc with our focus sharply defined, and i don't think we
should cast it aside because we feel guilty about not reaching out to
the masses.

that doesn't mean that you, jaineel, can't simultaneously achieve
something in rural areas. you should co-ordinate with agencies that do
work in those areas -- speak to jyoti sekhsaria, for instance, who
sent out an email about a project that mckinsey is interested in doing
-- and add another dimension to what we do at TII. see my point?

i don't think we should worry about scale yet. instead, as you point
out, we need to construct detailed notes and case studies of our
experiences with kids. i'll write my experiences in may, after i'm
done with my term essays, and before i leave for india. i'd have also
collected sufficient material for analysis by then.

v

[Jaineel Aga]

Hey Vijay,

Looks like you have quite a few mentoring projects on your hands! Sounds Good!! I too am helping out at least 1 potential student every week through orkut communities but this is mainly regarding engineering management and career opportunities thereafter etc. I will be in Europe for a month after I am done with my internship but once I am back in Mumbai and work starts in June I plant to get more structure about my strategy on ground in Mumbai and organize with more TII officers who are based here.  Will keep you guys posted. Till date the web based mentoring is the winner for sure!

Regards,

Jaineel

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