Light up your life

• Q: I am student of Class XII. I am interested in optics and would like to do research in photonics. Is there any institution in India that offers specific courses in this field?

— Diwakar Mankad

• A: The International School of Photonics at Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) in Kerala is one of the few institutes in the country that offers facilities for research, development and teaching of photonics and related fields.

Photonics is a high-tech subject that has evolved from the fusion of optical technology with electronics. It has an impact on a wide range of fields from communication, computing and control to medicine, defence and entertainment.

Since it is a cutting-edge technology, those who choose to go for higher studies after the Cusat course, can land well-paying jobs in the fibre optics industry. Photonics companies, which supply optical components, systems and software, are also growing rapidly. These need experts in the field to design, manufacture and test photonics components.

Cusat offers a five-year integrated MSc programme in photonics. The course has a significant component of physics. However, it has very little of mathematics, chemistry or statistics — just enough for students to understand the science of photonics.

The emphasis is more on practicals than on theory. From the third semester onwards, students are assigned to a faculty member who helps them with their laboratory work. The tenth semester is devoted completely to project work, which has to be undertaken in an industry research and development laboratory or in a reputed national laboratory.

Students are sent to various national laboratories such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and the National Physical Laboratory in New Delhi for project work. Some even go abroad for internship as well as for projects.

Draw up your budget carefully

• Q: I want to apply to King’s College and the London School of Economics in the UK for LLM. What will be the total living expenditure for a year? What sort of part-time jobs are available for students and what percentage of expenses will they cover?

— Kajoli Sen

• A: The average cost should be about £12,000 to £16,000 (Rs 8,54,960 to Rs 11,40,101), including living costs (the average cost of living in London is £600 to £750 [Rs 42,762 to Rs 53,464] per month).

Part-time jobs in the UK may include working in cafeteria or in the college, as a salesperson or at a petrol pump. You can work only 20 hours per week during your term period. You may earn approximately five to seven pounds per hour.

However, these earnings are only indicative and are usually not enough to cover tuition fees or living expenses.

Bet big on foreign B-schools

• Q: I have been working for four years in an IT company. I am now planning to do MBA from abroad. I have heard so much about B-schools in the US. Would it be a good idea to look at B-schools in other parts of the world as well?

— Sagar Lakhpal

• A: Academically speaking, top non-US B-schools differentiate from the US schools by offering personal coaching, humanities courses and condensed formats that allow students to complete postgraduation in management in half the time. As a result, they are much more on the radar than they were eight years ago.

Being smaller in size, these institutes can deliver a personalised experience unheard of at most B-schools in the US. For instance, at Queens in Ontario, Canada (No.1 international non-US B-school in the BusinessWeek ranking), each student has access to five coaches —from a personal development coach who checks in with you regularly to a personal fitness trainer. At IMD (No. 7) at Lausanne in Switzerland, students receive 20 hours of therapy to help them understand themselves and manage their lives better. Team coaches actively encourage disagreements, forcing students to learn how to deal with confrontation.

Some non-US programmes take the international experience to a level that simply can’t be matched by the study abroad trips and international case studies featured in the US programmes.

At the London Business School (No. 5), most students are from different parts of the world. At INSEAD (No. 3), in Fontainebleau, France, not more than 10 per cent of the faculty comes from any one country. And at Madrid’s IE Business School (No. 2), last year’s class of 287 included 55 diverse nationalities, including citizens from Kazakhstan and El Salvador. Incidentally, IE scored the highest student satisfaction rating among all BusinessWeek ranked schools.

While top institutes in the US follow a two-year format, more top schools in Europe and Canada are condensing their programmes to fit a one-year time frame. Even London Business School allows students to graduate in 15 months instead of 21.

Other innovations include lessons in communication. At Oxford University’s Saïd Business School (No. 10), students are encouraged to take classes in the humanities and social entrepreneurship. University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management (No. 8) has added new humanities workshops to create an “integrated thinking” curriculum that challenges students to solve business problems in non-traditional ways.