Build While You Learn: Rethinking Engineering Education
Engineering education must prepare students not just to find jobs, but to identify problems, build solutions and create value.
Can students create value while they are still learning? Why should education be treated only as an expense incurred today in the hope of earning an income tomorrow? Why should students wait until graduation to put their knowledge to work?
Engineers are trained to redesign systems that do not work well. Why, then, should we hesitate to redesign engineering education itself?
The Mandi experiment, pioneered in 2004 at NITIE, Mumbai (now IIM Mumbai), by one of us, Prof. T. Prasad, popularly known as “Mandi Sir,” offers a way forward. Mandi takes students beyond the classroom into an actual marketplace, where they interact with customers and sell real products. They learn to understand needs, communicate usefulness, negotiate prices, face rejection and learn from experience. The market becomes a classroom and the customer an unusually candid examiner.
At the heart of Mandi is the idea of “earn while you learn.” Earning provides tangible evidence that someone outside the classroom values what a student can offer. But students gain more than money. They gain experience, confidence and self-awareness. The market tests not only the product. It tests the learner.
Market as a Classroom
Engineering is knowledge converted into action. A mechanical engineering student who redesigns a tool to reduce a worker’s physical strain is already putting engineering into practice. So is an electronics student developing an affordable sensor for a small manufacturer or a computer science student automating a repetitive process. Knowledge meets a user, a need, a cost and a test of practical worth.
This is Enterprising Engineering. It does not mean every student must establish a start-up. It means learning to recognize opportunities, work within real-world constraints and take responsibility for turning knowledge into useful solutions. The alternative to being only a job seeker is not necessarily becoming an entrepreneur. It is becoming an enterprising individual.
For engineers, the Mandi need not be a literal marketplace. It can be a factory, farm, hospital, construction site or public institution. Wherever students engage with real users and test engineering solutions against their needs, there is potentially an engineering Mandi. Here, usefulness need not be demonstrated through a sale. It may be a problem solved, a process improved or a person whose life becomes easier.
The real world also asks questions that academic exercises may overlook. Is the solution affordable, reliable, repairable and ethical? Does it waste resources or harm the environment? Engineering is not complete merely because something works technically.
The Mandi experience has a deeper dimension. Students do not merely study customers, products and prices. They begin studying themselves. Can I explain an idea clearly? Listen when someone disagrees? Accept rejection and reconsider my assumptions? Behave ethically when money is involved? Take responsibility when something fails?
Such questions require experience followed by reflection. Students begin to recognize their strengths, weaknesses, habits and values. The journey moves from self-learning to self-reflection and ultimately to self-reliance. A student who has faced a customer, defended an idea, corrected a mistake and tried again has learned something no conventional examination can easily measure. Education becomes more than a degree to show an employer. It gives students the confidence and ability to act on their own knowledge.
Beyond Salary-Mindedness
There is nothing wrong with seeking a good job. Companies, governments and research institutions need capable engineers. The problem begins when salary and placement become the main measures of educational success.
A salary-oriented education asks, “How much will someone pay me for my qualification?” Education that builds ownership asks, “What can I do with what I have learned? What useful contribution can I make without waiting for someone else to define the opportunity?”
As artificial intelligence and automation reshape occupations, no curriculum can prepare students for every future job. Engineers must learn to recognize emerging needs, adapt their knowledge and create useful solutions in changing circumstances.
India is often said to produce too many engineers. Yet small manufacturers need affordable automation, farmers need equipment suited to small holdings, elderly people need inexpensive mobility aids, hospitals need simpler devices, and industries need to improve productivity while reducing energy consumption.
Why do so many engineering problems remain unsolved when we produce so many engineering graduates?
Perhaps the issue is not simply how many engineers we produce, but how effectively we prepare them to identify needs and create opportunities. Connecting engineering talent with unmet needs requires initiative, institutional support and an understanding of what users can afford.
Much of classroom-based engineering education teaches students to solve problems already identified and defined by someone else. Outside the classroom, needs may be hidden, users may struggle to describe them, and technical, economic and human constraints may conflict.
We must teach engineers not only how to solve problems, but how to find problems worth solving. Enterprising Engineering should begin with the problem, not with a fashionable technology searching for an application.
Engineering colleges could supplement conventional project lists with banks of real problems brought to them by industries, hospitals, farmers, public agencies and local communities. A problem bank could become an engineering college’s own Mandi, connecting students directly with people and organizations seeking solutions.
With faculty guidance, students could use laboratories and workshops to build, test and improve solutions. Some attempts would fail. A failed prototype can force students to question assumptions, return to fundamentals, listen to users and try again. Students learn, apply their knowledge, test their ideas against reality, reflect, improve and learn again.
Such projects should not end with a demonstration or a final examination. Students should return to the people who identified the problem, observe how their solutions perform in actual use and make necessary improvements. This continuing engagement would help them understand that engineering success is ultimately determined beyond the laboratory.
Student projects should, wherever possible, demonstrate benefits beyond the campus. A user should benefit, a process should improve, a cost should fall or a product should work better.
Such learning cannot depend on individual initiative alone. If students are to become enterprising, institutions must become more enterprising too. Industry should come to campuses not only to recruit graduates but also to bring problems. Hospitals, farmers, small enterprises, alumni and communities can become educational partners. Promising solutions need support for field testing, refinement and adoption beyond the campus.
Faculty guiding such work should receive academic recognition, while assessment should value creation, judgment, ethics and demonstrated usefulness alongside examination performance.
None of this diminishes mathematics, science or engineering fundamentals. Students often appreciate fundamentals more deeply when reality exposes weaknesses in their designs. Theory becomes knowledge they need to make something work.
At graduation, alongside asking students where they have been placed, perhaps we should ask what they made, what problem they discovered, who benefited and what they learned about themselves. Let them discover the confidence that comes from creating something useful while they are still learning.
Learn while doing, create while learning, own what you create and become self-reliant. Do not wait for graduation to begin being an engineer. That is Enterprising Engineering.
(Dr. Paknikar is an ANRF Prime Minister Professor at COEP Technological University, Pune, and former Director of the Agharkar Research Institute. Prof. Prasad is a Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai. Views personal.)
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