Chipping in with a soft loan course

SIFTING the grain from the chaff and choosing the right IT education institute is the dilemma of every youth looking for a passport to a software job abroad.

Wonder what makes a successful software professional? Not just the logic of the language. There has to be someone who goes beyond.

There are IT institutes working like ``factories'' producing trained hands to meet the short-term needs of the market on the one hand and the ``ivy league'' software courses run by the big names, with the ``promise of a U.S. visa waiting for the graduate''. Moreover, if the institute is well known, the course tends to get more pricey.

Enter the new breed of trainers: Academics, who quit academia to start their own training outfit.

Prof. V. Krishnamoorthy, with two decades of teaching experience in computer science at the Anna University, is among those who have taken the plunge. He was a professor in the subject, in charge of the MCA, when he decided to quit the institution and start his own.

``I felt brilliant students need a chance to use their brain power and come up in life. Thus `Information Research and Education' (Inforeed for short) was born. I took voluntary retirement to start the institution which also has a social cause. To sustain the concept, some students will be admitted who are able to pay. Other brilliant students who cannot afford to pay now will be assisted with loans from philanthropists or banks or from Inforeed itself.

``Today, a good software professional can earn a lot in a short time when they can repay the course loan'', says the academic, who is a member of the I.T Task Force Sub- committee of the State Government and a Tamil Software Certification Committee.

Inforeed's plan for the Post-Graduate course runs like this: a five-month theory and lab session beginning August 2 at a premises in Padmanabha Nagar, Adyar. Later, students become part of its software development team for three months, to work on live projects to get real-life experience. (Course fee about Rs. 35,000).

A dynamic curriculum will include computer organisation, Algorithms, database concepts, data structures, object-oriented programming, software engineering, Networking, e- Business and Java.

Dr. Krishnamoorthy (Tel. 4413940) says industry and academic professionals will supplement the course with special lectures. ``It is an intensive course which means a lot of homework..'', says the professor, who has authored Tamil books on computing and Tamil wordprocessor software. He is currently working on a Tamil spell-check software.

By K. Ramachandran

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