Interview with Mr. Rohan Rawat, Country Manager (India), Georgian College

Mr. Rohan Rawat is a multi-faceted personality. He is the India Educational partner for Georgian College, a Trade Commissioner for Fashion with Indian Economic Trade Organization (IETO), and an Animal Activist, among other things. His work ranges from being the Cultural Advisor to the Consulate of Suriname, to inspiring kids across schools as a Motivational Speaker on success. 

He has volunteered for Ignite India, creating awareness among slum kids about energy sources and the benefits of working towards using renewable sources. Apart from this, He has organized a number of competitions and campaigns in schools around Bangalore to motivate the students. He has held numerous seminars and his links with international educational institutions have facilitated a number of students in getting admissions in prestigious universities abroad. He holds an MBA and a Post Graduate from NIFT, and has already earned prestige at an age when people struggle to make a foothold. 

The trend of Return of Investment has now moved to Canada

In my professional career spanning 15 years, I have spent 12 successful years in the education sector. My career took me places, wherein I had the privilege of working for Singapore and US markets. Maximum of the students look for their return on Investment. I have worked as a trainer for IDP in the North American Region, where my role was to train the counselor. Thus, with experience there, the trend which was started by the USA, has now moved to Canada.

Diverse recruitment from different cities makes the classroom diverse as well

We look out for diverse recruitment. Thus, our priority goes from metro cities to south India, then catering to small cities of Punjab and Gujarat. We have seen tier-2 cities have great financial potential and good quality students. Therefore, we have expanded our operations to the cities in the southern region, especially Telangana, Andhra Pradesh. This makes the classroom very diverse. Our marketing activities are rooted through our third-party partners like we have 45 offsite agents, and we help them in conducting education seminars throughout the year, but due to COVID’19, we are organizing digital campaigns and webinars.

The difference between the same course in India and Georgian is the difference of exposure

As the tagline for our college says, "Experience Georgian", this itself is a statement that we are a community-owned college and we are so huge that all the facilities are taken care of. I would say all the community colleges are the same but the experience of Georgian cannot be experienced anywhere else. The difference between the course, which I will study in India to that of Georgian, would be the exposure I will be getting in a classroom session. We have a better mentor relationship, where everyone calls each one by his/her name instead of addressing Sir/Ma’am. We have a program called interference in which students can sit and discuss their holistic performance.

People in Canada are welcoming as they themselves have moved from some other country

Canada is a new country, like 200 years. they don’t have their heritage or culture. When someone from Canada comes to India, I show them that this is from 800 AD or so, they get amazed. Here, in Canada, people are welcoming as they have moved there from some other country. There are no cultural differences in Canada. Also, if you check there are a lot of Sikhs in the Canadian Govt. Every Indian student is being treated well over there, in fact, the third language in Canada is Punjabi. We have a student union at Georgian college where the president itself might be from the Gujarati community. 

The aim is to expand in different cities to fetch quality students 

We focus on the quality of the students. We are aiming to expand in some cities, where we are still lacking to fetch in good students. This also happens because of lack of knowledge, thus we have shifted our focus in the North East to guide the potential students and make them aware about the course curriculum.

We are working towards opening other campuses to increase the number of intake of the students

The initial phase is the difficult one wherein the influx of students is low. Now, the situation is that we have an overflow of the students who want to take admission. We have an average conversion of about 70% and our Visa approval rate is also high, close to 97.8%. We can’t increase the number of international students in our college, as Georgian being a community college. Thus, we have been given a certain limit by the government. We are working towards opening other campuses as well for international students to take more admissions.

Students get to learn the adaptability and understand team management skills with all our courses

We provide CO-OP programs to students, which make them job ready, as industrial trainers guide them through their education journey. Apart from this, the students do part time work that makes them self-dependent and also help them understand team management and build personality. They understand how to behave in professional attire and how to coordinate. They improve their communication skills and learn how Canadian citizens work that helps them to settle down. We have a 150-acre campus so it's very important for students to do networking because there are a lot of job opportunities within the campus itself.

There are multiple programs best suited for student’s choice

All our graduate courses are top rated like Big-data Analytics, Project Management, Information Security and we have some skill-based programs like Power engineering technology. Also, we have human services programs like early child, social service workers. For nurses we have acute complete care for educated nurses but that’s only for graduated and experienced nurses. Hospitality programs are huge in demand in Canada, we have also done projects with the Ontario Govt on the same.

We have started teaching digitally, except for the lab-based programs which are getting hampered

We have started digital classes, where the student has to log in to blackboard and the professor will be giving the lectures. Only lab-based programs are getting hampered as you can give lectures digitally but not lab hands-on experience. We have Georgian Assist App available for students. We are also organizing potential webinars, live social media sessions. So, it’s a very unpredictable situation right now, what can be covered it's being done and the later part will be covered in next semester. As of now, there’s incoming flights because airlines have stopped. I hope that by 15th April everything will be sorted.