A Fist Look at QAU Ranking in Mechanical Engineering

Pakistani print and electronic media, is proudly reporting that Quaid-e-Azam University has been ranked 69th in world in "Engineering and Technology" category. Complete story can be found on APP's website. 

They deserve appraise for such an outstanding achievement but wait a minute, does it make complete sense. How could a university make such a huge progress to appear in top 100 world universities all of a sudden. On a positive note, we must find out how they did it and implement the same model for other universities as well. 

As I came to read that QAU ranked for the Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautical and Manufacturing category, the first thing I did was to ask two sane and sound looking engineers sitting around me to confirm if they knew whether QAU conducted Mechanical Engineering or any other Engineering course at all. Blank faces... :-(. You see them so often around,  blank faces. 

I checked on QAU's website and bad luck again, may be reflecting my poor googling skills. Nothing there in Engineering category. On a side note, you may agree that the beta version of new website looks definitely a lot cool and professional than the old one. 

Intrigued, I thought may be I can spare some time to see the actual source of the ranking. 2011 QS World University Rankings by Subject - Engineering & Technology Rankings. The first and only thing I got after a pressing Cntrl-F and looking for Pak was what I looked for. QS rankings seem to confirm what we claim. 

However, in the first place, the ranking never says exact rank sixty-nine, it's just 51-100 category. However, if you keep counting the rows from 50 onwards on that page, you reach rank 69 for sure.

Let's look at the top of the page to see how universities are ranked. Their are three criteria listed. Academic, Employer Ranking and Research Citations. MIT is at top and it scores 100, 84.9 and 61.3 in individual categories for an overall score of 83.9.

The university ranked one above QAU, Politecnico di Milano, Italy scores 30.9, 52.2 

and 22.4 respectively. 

But QAU's score are bit strange. 2.4 in academics, 5.2 in Employer and 92.8 in Research. You can do the rest of maths. It ain't that hard. However, the overall score is not mentioned at the QS website. 

A 92.8 score is incredibly high. It means we are probably ahead of all the universities in the world in mechanical engineering research.  Rice University scores 89.1 and Harvard 84.1 for citations. 

HEC says QAU is at top in its ranking with 544 indexed journal publications. I could not find how many papers MIT or Cambridge have published in same period of time and what is the amount of their citations. 

These rankings indicate the university ranks pretty bad in academics. 2.4 out of 100 is not a charming score after all. The only contributing factor to the ranking is the number of publications. A natural question pops up if research and academics have any relationship at all.2.4 in academics and 92.8 in research, does that sound logical and possible.

If I were aware of detailed ranking criteria, may be I had a different picture of the story. 

              

Sar Mein Jootay

The story was narrated by a close friend about a politician from the raja family of Khan Pur (near Taxila), Pakhtunkhwa. A political leader from their side was bragging about the number of primary schools in Pakhtunkhwa. Someone asked him, why he does not support the case for institutions of higher education in his area. The response was classical and accurately portrays the mindset of our politicians.  

In his words, 

"Jeray Primary pass ho janday nay, oh ta sanun salam nae kar k janday, jeray 10 par laysan... O te lazmi saday ser ech jootian marsan"

"Those who pass primary, they don't even say salam to us. If they pass 10th grade also, they will, for sure,  throw shoes at us."

And indeed that is what happened with these people. HEC, did not surrendered to the illegal demands of our corrupt politicians and exposed their fake degrees. 

The reciprocal response seems pretty natural. Similar has been happening to whosoever in our country  attempts to expose such cases of corruption and foul play. 

The First look at Malaysia - Entering UTP

Palms trees, with  height lower than the palms we see there in Pakistani,  there were lots and lots of them. This is the first thing I noticed while landing procedures began for Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA). The next thing, to amaze me was the expanse of KLIA. I walked and walked a long lounge with a couple of turns just to find that I needed to board on a bus to reach the immigration department. 

I had a chance to pass by the labourers and workers waiting for the travel agents to pick them up. For a moment, I thought if this is my chance to see real milita. (for years, I had spelled the word as 'Malaysia' when it really was militia - the men in dark gray shalwar qameez and peshawari chappal carrying big guns. I was told when in first grade  that their uniform cloth comes from Malaysia and so the force is called as 'Malasia walay'). The security personnel on the other counters, meant probably for visitors or may be aothers except workers category, were nicer and wont at all fit into my definition of security or police. 

There were long queues of people and would get longer and longer with each minute as a layer of people would be added to the zig-zag path leading to the counters. As I made it out of the airport TI was greeted like , "I am gonna kill you, you made me wait for so long" by an Egyptian foundation student who had traveled around 21 hours in multiple flights. He fell asleep in minutes as we started for the 3-hour drive to university with Mr. Hiduwan from UTP. All the way,  I kept him busy in answering my questions all the way. 

After an hour of so, I began to feel like I am missing something here, I could find on roads in Pakistan, what it was, definitely the beautifully decorated trucks saying 'Tere Yaad Aye Teray Jaane k Baad'. All of a sudden, it appeared as if there were going to be a traffic jam. Hiduwan predicted it would be an accident on the other side of the road. People are too curious, he continued, to see what happened until the persons and the vehicle is carried away, so an accident is the only option he felt could slow down the traffic. He told me about the Malaysian oil company Petronas, if the company collapses, so does Malaysia, and the various local car brands like Proton. My calculations, in Pak Rupees, revealed cars here are cheaper but not the way, friends as in US are. 

For once I could not believe my eyes, but it happened again and again. Women on bikes, were to be seen all along the highway. That's the norm, Hiduwan corrected me, equal rights, equal opportunities for all. Lately, I found women would work in all sectors just like men including office jobs, running shops, police or whatever it is. As we entered the university, a vast mosque with a dome and a sort-of-lake on two sides welcomed us. I came to learn that the people here don't hesitate in having one, two, any number of "Jamaats" after the first one. The warden at the hostel was playing football but soon returned to hand me the keys to my room. I bade Riduwan with "Terimah Kasih". I had met more number of Pakistani students here than I had even expected could be found here at Universiti Teknologi, Petronas, before getting the keys.

That was my first look at Malaysia. 

I am learning new things each day but some of them have already gone old. Probably, this is how it goes.

Lahore Horse Race June 2010.mp4

Thoughts About Flopped FYPs

All I am jotting out here is not at all supposed to be taken seriously. Its just a random listing of my observations and experiences with Final Year Project while I spent about two years of life in project lab sharing the joys and woes of students, faculty and staff.

The most prevalent and relevant issue, I have observed, is project selection. I do not mean finalizing the topic but finalizing the objectives and coming up with a verbal description of claims you have in heart. People, fail to come up with a list of specifics and claims about the device, hardware or software, whatever are planning to create, design or just borrow and display and label it as their Final Year Project . “Sari Hasrtain Dil mein hi reh jati hain.”

Often when project selection and specifics are unclear, there can’t be a way to allocate times for constituent tasks and components of the bigger task – The FYP. Synchronizing your individual timelines and coming up with a balanced schedule incorporating studies, the project, and your curricular, extra-curruculiar and “Gharicular”- home related activitvities is a big challenge.

If not accustomed to working in teams, it’s difficult to fairly and purposefully delegate tasks to individual team members according to our likes/dislikes, abilities and the demand of the hour. There are a lot of things around that hurt our “Anna”. I will like to put it as ‘Ego Issues’.

When the tasks are loosely delegated and there’s infinite time of a whole year, timelines also are too flexible, it’s not hard to fall a prey to procrastination – laziness and putting things off on a ideal, dreamy tomorrow. 

More to follow Inshallah.

I will wait for your comments and feedback.