VC Designate, JK Lakshmipat University: Dheeraj Sanghi Interview

Dheeraj Sanghi is presently serving as VC Designate at JK Lakshmipat University, Jaipur. He has been a prominent part of many renowned institutes in India and has managed wide ranging roles from running the Institute, managing admissions, student counselling, and designing and implementing new program structure. In addition, he has served at IIT Kanpur as Professor till May 2021 and Dean for academic affairs till 2014. Moreover, he has been a member of various committees like Board of Studies, Review Committee, Senate-Academic Council at different Institutes.

What are the key factors that keep you connected with the education sector?

“Education keeps you young at heart”

The primary reason I love working in the education sector is that it keeps you young at heart. You interact with smart young minds almost every day who come from different backgrounds and carry different ideas. As a result, the learning graph is usually exponential. Additionally, if you contribute to someone's learning or to someone's success in life, it is an incredibly rewarding experience, no matter how big or small the contribution is.

What is your philosophy of leadership? How would you describe your leadership style?

“A space to promote ideas irrespective of the age”

The primary Mantra for a leadership position in a university is that universities are not run by administrators but by Professors. Leading is primarily about creating an environment where faculty feel empowered to take initiatives. We should respect ideas and not the age/position of the person suggesting those ideas.

What can an inbound student gain from studying here in your University?

“Focus on Project Based Learning”

We have curated each discipline with minute details carefully with the help of faculty in IITs and abroad, which has strengthened us.In engineering, we collaborated with Olin College of Engineering to bring in their famous pedagogy of Project based learning. We do follow the modern pedagogy, and ensure our complete focus to inculcate diverse skills via project based learning. The other important aspect of our engineering programs is the exchange opportunities with several top institutions in India and abroad, including IITs, IIITs, and Univ. of Florida.

In our Design programs, flexibility is the key. A student does not join a specific branch but joins the Institute of Design. After one year, having been exposed to different branches of design, the student selects the branch he wants to take up for the rest of the three years.

In our MBA program, the focus is on Digital. What should be the skills that a manager needs in today’s digital world? We expose our students to all sorts of applications and technologies during MBA. 

How does the curriculum of JK Lakshmipat University ensure the best practice of industry?

“We prepare students according to industry norms”

Being a university setup by a corporate group (JK Organization), we have very close connections with industry. It is not just that there are some folks from industry in our Boards of Studies as per UGC norms, we get a lot of industry professionals to deliver guest lectures. Many people from industry are our adjunct faculty and teach courses, particularly in Design and Management. We have compulsory industry internships in every program. (As a positive side effect, this has resulted in several pre-placement offers.) We want to make sure that our students in each of our programs are aware of industry practices, but at the same time we want our curriculum to be broad enough that they can take up very diverse challenges in their careers.

Check JK Lakshmipat University Placement

How is your university welcoming to students of different races or economic backgrounds?

“We ensure to provide scholarships to most of our students”

The university offers scholarships very liberally. Almost 50% of our incoming students every year get generous scholarships in terms of tuition waivers and even hostel subsidies. Details of this are available on our admissions page. The university is completely transparent in terms of its policies on scholarships.

What do you think your roles and responsibilities to the University and the students are?

“Our utmost focus is to provide nation with great human resources”

I ensure that students avail quality education which prepares them for the future aspects when they come to the university. Since the university holds a prestigious legacy of 150 years, we ensure to match the expectations of the incoming students. 

Also, we ensure that the nation progresses with our quality students and the students take responsibility for disseminating knowledge in terms of research. To achieve these goals, the most important responsibility of a VC is to recruit quality faculty. Most of the faculty members we recruit are alumni of IITs, IIMs, NIDs, and good universities abroad. Once quality faculty is there, most things run on auto-pilot. But still there is a need to monitor and make sure that all processes are happening in time and with quality. Also, the administrative support enables all academic activities and there are no roadblocks.

What do you think should be the University’s top priority over the next 10 years?

“Upgradation towards achieving the pinnacle in the education”

The initial priority would be to strengthen the existing programs in terms of increasing the class-size, recruiting more quality faculty members, keep upgrading the labs with time, etc. A parallel effort will be to strengthen our research by building more labs, focused recruitment, having more PhD students, etc. In the medium to long term, we need to add more disciplines to truly become a multi-disciplinary university that the NEP 2020 expects all universities to become. Also, we should be offering educational programs that are interdisciplinary in nature. An important aspect of planning for the future is to consider how technology is likely to change the role of a university. We believe that there will be a lot more just-in-time learning by working professionals and the focus on full-time residential Masters programs will go down. We need to be ready for such a future by starting online weekend programs for the working professionals.

What would you like people to know about your university they may not know?

“Our 150 year old legacy speaks for our philanthropy”

When students and parents think of a private university, they carry a negative mindset of someone out there to make a quick buck at their cost. I would like everyone to know that we are a university setup by JK Organization, a 150-year old industry group, which is highly respected all over India. It is truly a philanthropic effort where they are actually providing a huge subsidy every year to the university. Their focus on quality has resulted in perhaps the best student-to-faculty ratio among all universities. Also whatever we do, we do it for impact and not just for image building. So our MoUs with industry or universities abroad actually result in internships, student exchange, and other collaborations. The other aspect of our university is its transparency. Whatever we will say, we would never mislead you or give anyone false hopes. We are in this space to truly transform the lives of our students and through them the society.

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Any suggestions you would like to give to the current youth and the aspiring students?

“Put in efforts and research while taking up a college”

To the aspiring students, I will ponder upon one aspect, don’t get misled by rankings and data on social media. You must visit each campus that you are interested in, talk to not just the admission team, but with faculty and students and find out about the program first hand. And then take the decision. Of course, it would be difficult to travel to every place during Covid times. But whatever is possible, do that.

The next thing I want to emphasize is that if you join JKLU, be ready to work hard. You will need to learn a lot of things within the duration of the program. And at the same time, you will also need to spend time on extra curricula, and building friendships that will last a lifetime.