“The biggest takeaway from IIT-Madras will not be whether you know thermodynamics or something else but the ability to learn new things. Learning to learn will be the biggest lesson that you will take away from your IIT days,” Nandan Nilekani, Former Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India and co-founder, Infosys, told graduating students of IIT Madras.

“The good news is that you got a degree from IIT-Madras, and the not-so-good news is that you cannot stop learning. You have to keep learning for the rest of your life because we are entering an era of life-long learning,” he said at the institute’s 54th Convocation Day.

Nilekani said he was an entrepreneur for nearly 30 years and was also part of government engaged in a start-up (UIDAI) but never seen the pace of change as high as it is today. One cannot predict the kind of job that a person will do in the future or the kind of organisation he/she will work in the future. Being an entrepreneur, one cannot predict what the pivots in business will be, he said.

The rate of change is doubling every 18 months. “This means many jobs that exist today will not exist tomorrow, and many new jobs will be created tomorrow that don’t exist today,” he said.

For instance, machines are becoming smarter with new technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and deep learning and will take away repetitive jobs that they can do well. However, machines will never take away jobs that involve people to do well.

Therefore, soft skills and doing things with empathy, able to collaborate and work as a team cannot be automated. Students should develop these capabilities to get things done in a different way that have a high degree of human interaction, he said.

Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director, IIT Madras, said that in the past academic year, the institute not only sustained the No.1 ranking among engineering institutes in the NIRF ranking for the second year running, but was also ranked second for overall performance among all universities in India.

Nilekani presented prizes to students while Ramamurthi awarded degrees to graduating students. A total of 2,263 degrees were awarded this year.

Prize winners

The President of India Prize (Bharat Ratna M Visvesvaraya Memorial Prize and Banco Foundation Prize), Chinmay Jha, B.Tech (Mechanical Engineering); Governor’s Prize – Vishal Katariya, B.Tech (Physics); V Srinivasan Memorial Prize (Alumni Association Prize) – Vidhya Ramaswamy, Dual Degree (Computer Science Engineering); and Shankar Dayal Sharma Prize – Shashwat Nitin Sinai Salgaocar, B.Tech (Aerospace Engineering)

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