St Wilfred's Institute of Engineering and Technology, Ajmer, Head of Architecture Department: Ar. Pratibha Tandon Interview

Ar. Pratibha Tandon is working as a Head of the Architecture Department at St Wilfred's Institute of Architecture. She holds a Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in Architecture. Before joining St. Wilfred, she worked as an Architect and Teacher. Her areas of expertise are Architectural design, Presentation and Communication skills, good command of the language, Planning, Time management, and Auto CAD, and 3-D’s Max. 

What are your roles and responsibilities?

“To offer the best knowledge and guidance”

Each genre and each stage of education has its own specific needs. Talking about the course of Bachelor's in Architecture, as a faculty member, my duty is to teach, disseminate and impart basic knowledge or applied knowledge to students, and assist students in the learning process, and apply this knowledge to students to make them more pragmatic.

How do you establish healthy relations with the students and fellow faculty? 

“By promoting an open environment to communicate”

To maintain a healthy relationship with students and my fellow faculty, I try to enforce regular communication between the students and the teachers. I keep an emphasis on effective pedagogy and pay increased attention to the learning needs of the individual. This focus on learning incorporates a broad set of goals for learners, such as students' mastery of content, their abilities to consider and critique, and particularly in professional fields, the development of skill sets that enable students to undertake tough professional situations. 

How do you introduce a practical and industry-oriented approach to subjects?

“Through more experiments and accommodation of industry needs in the curriculum”

The architecture course itself is designed to focus on real-world problems and emphasizes the learning of contemporary and futuristic materials and techniques. We encourage our students to get some freelance work in their final year to familiarize themselves with the practical work.

Which best practices are offered by the department to the students to gain necessary skills?

“We provide them various cultural and educational opportunities to build skills”

We encourage our students to work together on a creative challenge and allow them to reflect on the learnings they take from the exercise. For this we teach them tolerance and resilience to build skills, students will need to feel comfortable communicating with others. It can be challenging to tailor the curriculum for each individual, but by looking ahead we start to pinpoint elements of classes that will appeal to particular students’ strengths and interests. 

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How do you strategize and update the curriculum to make it befitting for the students?

“We update the curriculum regularly with industry needs and students present skills”

We focus on real-world problems and emphasize the learning of contemporary and futuristic materials and techniques. Every 5 years as one batch passes it’s good to update the curriculum.

What are your views upon the placements and higher education from your department?

“We are best in terms of education and placement”

Architecture is a multidimensional stream to have a higher education or a specialization that gives one an edge over others in this competitive age and makes placement that much easier. We facilitate communication between students and architectural firms by keeping in mind student capability, aspirations, and geographical restrictions. 

How do you help your student to cope up with this competitive world? 

“We use various tools and techniques to make them future-ready”

We do follow a lot of practices to ensure that students are being prepared as per the latest industry needs.

1. Encourage students to compete against themselves.
2. Being transparent about competition performance.
3. Make your competitions about more than winning one trophy.
4. Creating a culture of cheerleading and good sportsmanship.

What extracurricular activities are organized to enhance the skills of the students?

“Various cultural, social activities and competitions are organized for this”

Yes, we do by involving them in sports and cultural activities. We encourage our students to speak and work for social causes, make the student confident, and help them be better citizens ready for real-world challenges.

What are the challenges you faced to uplift the quality of education of your department?

“Financial constraints is definitely a big issue here”

The financial load on students in pursuing architecture in terms of resources used is a burden at all. As an architecture institute, we try to reduce to the best of our ability to make it easy for a student who is not financially sound. 

What was your vision while joining this college and how are you trying to achieve the same? 

“To ensure best quality education for students so they can represent themselves at national and international level”

My vision for this institute was to provide students with the exposure, confidence, and education to prepare them to compete at the world level and we are doing that by participating in national and international competitions to calibrate our potential at that level.

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How does the curriculum of your college ensure the best practices of the industry? 

“Our faculties are offered various training sessions to prepare and update it”

The institute encourages faculty to attend development programs and organizes training programs, seminars and workshops to keep themselves updated and in touch with the real world. We also ask our students to design problems keeping in mind present and future needs by studying new and contemporary materials techniques and bylaws.

What do you see as the college’s greatest strengths and how it can be enhanced?

“Our teaching and non-teaching staff are our main pillars of strength”

Our strengths are our highly motivated students, faculty, and staff. All of them are cohesively working to build a stronger and preferred destination for students, faculty, and corporations. We strive to develop the best attributes of each person so that they can reach their maximum potential. We also conduct construction site visits for the students to have firsthand experience and ask them to work on case studies and market surveys to study real cases and develop better communication skills.

What valuable advice would you like to the students for a prosperous career ahead? 

“Be humble and make the best use of every opportunity that comes your way”

 Cultivate perseverance, Search for the value in feedback or criticism, venture outside of your comfort zone and most importantly believe in yourself because failure at some point is inevitable