Kumar Rahul Mayank is presently serving as Assistant Professor - Fashion and Textile Design at CODE, Vivekananda Global University (VGU), Jaipur. A Gold Medalist for his collection in NIFT, he has almost 12 years of industrial experience and 08 years of experience in academics. Also, he is the Founder and Director of an export house named Jina Paper Studio Pvt. Ltd. dealing in handmade paper products and packaging with buyers from all across EU, America and Middle Eastern countries.

CODE VGU

What are your roles and responsibilities towards the students?

“Teaching and organization of subject knowledge”

As a Fashion & Textile Design faculty, my roles and responsibilities include teaching subjects like Design Project, CAD, Portfolio Development, Visual Merchandising, History of Fashion and Textiles and Textile Science. Organizing Fashion shows in and off-campus, and guiding students in their Design collection are also part of my responsibilities.

How do you tend to establish healthy relations within your University?

“Building trust and confidence among students and fellow faculty”

Being a part of Design Institution, I try to act like a mentor and professional senior to the students so that they can share their thought process and design ideas comfortably and conveniently without the fear of right or wrong. We know that Design is about thinking out of the box, so if we want students to think this way, then we will have to show trust in them. I just try to carry this trust factor among students as well as fellow faculty. If professionally, we can make friends around, working becomes easier and interesting.

How do you try to bring in a practical approach towards subjects?

“Strategizing the curriculum and activities for maximum benefit”

I personally always try sharing my experience of how I used these subjects practically and what was the outcome. So, my own examples give confidence to students regarding the concerned subjects. My main focus is to set the curriculum in a way that keeps students intact to the module and help them learn in the most practical way. To keep a check on the students’ involvement, every week there is a review of earlier sessions, either in the form of a Jury or some practical exercise. Every year once we update our curriculum so that anything missing or inappropriate can be rectified for the best of the students. Also, for students to understand the Textiles, Crafts & Fashion world better, we take them to various Textile Industry visits, National Weavers Service Center workshops, International Trade shows, etc.

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How do you help your student to cope up with the high competition?

“Diverse opportunities to expose to the practical environment”

I try to give students the maximum exposure of the real professional world either in terms of making them visit and backstage renown fashion events, visit national and international level exhibitions and Trade shows. Also, visits to various Design houses, internship and industrial training in export, manufacturing and buying houses is done on a regular basis. These exposures strengthen students from inside and helps in developing inherent confidence to face the professional world which lacks commonly in other design students giving them an upper hand in their career run. Moreover, we conduct a minimum of 4 fashion shows every year where our students can showcase their design collection.

What challenges do you face to uplift the quality of education in your department?

“Maintenance of quality and cost simultaneously” 

Today, Design education is one of the most trending courses, so there is a fierce competition in terms of facilitating students at minimum cost which would be a compromise in terms of quality. So, apart from this hazard, we as an institution are trying our best to stand-out in terms of consistently maintaining best quality at competitive cost making ourselves affordable for all those who aspire big in the field of Design.

What approaches do you bring in apart from curriculum to train the students?

“Integrating industrial expertise and visits”

Almost twice every month, we schedule market and industrial visits to keep students updated of the prevailing trends and commercial aspects of the fashion field. We also conduct lectures, seminars and workshops for students where we invite Fashion Designers and fashion people from different genres to share their professional expertise and market experience with our students.

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What valuable advice would you like to give to the students?

“Develop more practical skills and zeal to be a fashion designer”

The most important advice for students would be to develop problem solving attitude and critical thinking abilities because that is what is needed to become a designer. As a fashion student, always try being a fashion enthusiast, go crazy for Fashion, start living it every moment and the journey would become conveniently interesting because believe me-or-not, but this journey is way too long than you think. And most importantly, keep visually educating yourself.