Why do we have so many engineers in India?

Are you one of those, who has almost every other cousin and every other friend of his doing engineering? Are you one those who get pissed off when they get to hear that a particular friend  who got 50% marks in his senior secondary exam is also studying engineering? Are you one of those who get a shocker when they come to know that one of their friend, who was studying biology and wanted to become a doctor, is also now studying engineering?

Why do we have engineers all around?

This is how it happens. 

As soon as he starts making some sense of this world, every child starts getting bombarded with questions about what he would like to become when he grows up. In fact, this is one of the most common questions that people ask him. And at that moment, the child says – Doctor, Pilot, Engineer and so on. The child grows up a bit. In his secondary schooling days, he is told that he will have to pick a stream to study further. This is the first encounter that this child has with this question which would haunt him again at various points in his life. To make it impossible for the poor thing, he is told that once you pick up a stream, it would become your life and that change won’t be easy. The child is bombarded with advices coming from each direction. He does not have enough time. He must decide and decide fast. At this point of time, if either the family has a background in arts and the child, while growing up has had some sort of exposure to some kind of art, and if he thinks that he likes it, then he will at least think about taking up Arts. Same is true for commerce. But suppose, if he is not able to decide at this point of time, he will go with the flow and he won’t even realize it.  

What does going with the flow mean? It means that if you are studying in a school in India and if you do not know what you want to do with your life, then you will definitely try to become an engineer, unless, you are studying in a school where they don’t teach science or you did not clear the cut off. In that case, you always have the option to change the school where you can study PCM, to be eligible to become an engineer. Since all your friends too are in the same miserable condition of cluelessness as you are in and they too are going to become an engineer, you feel better and think that it must be good. Your parents are happy too.

Then you finish your school. Sit for some entrance exams to get into an engineering college. Now here when the preparation actually starts, everybody thinks that he is going to make it to an IIT. But as time goes by and the poor you get some perspective, you give up the idea of making it too IIT. Who needs an IIT to become an engineer these days?

Now the interesting thing about doing engineering is that no matter how screwed up your performance in your senior secondary exam and the entrance exams is, you will find an engineering college, good enough for you. It is somewhat like that crappy line they say in romantic movies and novels –  God has made one , for everyone. You know what I mean!

So that’s about it. You get admission to this college and come out as an engineer. (In this article, I am not addressing those 5% of engineers who actually wanted to become engineers. I have utmost respect for them.) Now the process repeats. If your college is a good engineering college, you will get placed in some consultancy or a finance firm. If you are a techie, you will be picked up by the top most tech. companies that visit your campus. But if you are in a mediocre college, (which is the case with 90% of the engineering students) your college probably won’t have these reputed firms waiting for you and you will have to settle for the IT companies. You will become a software engineer .  The funny part is that they won't give a damn if you are a mechanical engineer or say a civil engineer. (All these engineers are absorbed easily in the market since India has become an outsourcing hub where all that a professional needs is just enough salary, to be able to meet his ends. So this outsourcing machine actually acts like a suction pump to suck in engineers.)

Even after you accept this and decide to move on, the same old question comes to haunt you again. You see that every other friend of yours is now going for an MBA. And yet again you are as clueless as you always are, about whether you to want to join them or not with no particular idea about whether you want to do an MBA at all or not. (But I have also seen many people who pick up a high paying profession and make it their interest). Anyway, the point is that another rat race starts and probably here also you will go with the flow.

Conclusion

Explore things, try out new things. See what you are good at. There are so many alternate career options available these days. Choose something that you love, choose something that is a bit different from the rest. Do this well before time. And If you don’t, there is a 90 percent chance that soon enough you will realize that you have become a software engineer. Just like I did !

PS: It seems that now nobody wants to remain a software engineer. Everybody wants to be a MBA graduate. I hope someday I will be writing an article on that too and all I will need to do would be replacing engineering with business administration, in this same article and it will suffice!


Read an another post by me on similar theme