Q. Can you talk about your broader academic journey and how it has led you to where you are right now as principal or secretary of JDC?

I joined college service in the year 2000. Up until 2016, I taught at a college in my subject of mathematics, then I got into academic administration. I joined here in December of 2016.

Q. What is it like for you to be the presiding head of operations of JDC, one of the renowned women’s government colleges in the state, and how has your journey been since joining office as principal in 2016?

You know, in every journey, not just here as an administrator or teacher in some other college or in your personal life, “balance” is very important. You have to face many situations and many different kinds of people, and you have to have some goal that you must have imprinted in your mind. And to achieve that goal, you have to balance everything. The act of balancing itself is not as easy as it sounds, not always, because, after all, administrators are also human beings. So, you can lose your temper; you may be tempted to lose your temper, tempted to do something that will adversely affect you in the future. But you have to control yourself. And at all times, you have to keep in mind your ultimate goal.

Q. Can you please give an example?

As I said, it is not always easy; sometimes you can lose your temper, but do not be vindictive. Try to understand what others are trying to say, what their motives are, and what their reasons are. Sometimes students tend to lack reason. They just make certain demands or request something, but we cannot always fulfil those demands or requests. We need to try to make them understand what is good for the institution; even if we don’t succeed in making them understand, we need to try. You need to keep trying. Don’t keep grudges; don’t take any vindictive measures against them. After all, they are in their growing stage and don’t have much experience. The maturity that I have today was only gained through my journey. They don’t have that yet. So, try to make them understand.

Q. How would you describe your working environment here at JDC and your dynamic with fellow teachers and professors?

A: It is very fine.

Q. How do you and your team of teachers and professors remain updated and keep up with the changing times so as to be aware of their demands and developments? In the sphere of teaching, too, it must be applicable.

Actually, whenever you interact with students and teachers, you will understand what changes are going on. It’s not that difficult. You have media—print media and online digital media—but it’s not always easy to keep up with all the changes.

Q. What kind of difficulties do you face?

Often, you have plans to do many things, but funds could be a constraint. Even if you have goodwill and good wishes, there could be a lack of finances. It’s not always easy, but as I told you about balancing, you have to always maintain that act of balancing. So,the amount of funds I can give here or somewhere must not disturb the actual goal of teaching and learning. Teaching in all aspects, not only the subjects but teaching as a whole. This includes building the character of students and maintaining balance.

Q. What programmes and initiatives are you looking forward to introducing and conducting in your upcoming years as the principal of the college for its growth?

Our primary aim is to build another campus because we have a shortage of space that is very much felt across the community of students as well as teachers. We are dependent on sharing the building, and we cannot extend the time we spend here. Though this building is our own,its accommodation capacity is not up to our requirements, so we have bought land in Sonarpur. Our main focus is to develop our own campus there, and for that, we are trying to gather grants and development funds from outside, including from private and government agencies. Other than that, the development, the activity, and the work that is going on—all those must go on. Like in the spheres of teaching, learning, and maintenance of existing infrastructure. All this must be maintained. But if you want to know what our main goal is in the near future, it is to develop our second and own full-fledged campus.

Q. What steps is the college taking to help with providing job placements after post graduation to its students, as employment even after completing studies has become a difficulty in current times?

It’s a problem that students that are graduating from this college and other colleges too are experiencing. Actually, there are two categories of students. The first group comprises those who want to pursue higher education after graduation. The other group comprises students who cannot go onto higher studies because they are studying general subjects, or now what is called the “three-year course” or “multidisciplinary courses. These students need to prepare themselves for the job market. For these students and even those who intend to go onto higher studies, we have a career counselling cell, and we try to offer different career-oriented courses throughout the year. For instance, we are currently offering a training course for those who want to enter the government service for a very nominal fee, and parallelly, we are offering a beauty course. We are also offering a course in spoken Spanish that is being done online, and of late we have introduced a portal that is available on our website, a personalised career counselling portal. Not only our students, but other students too, can access this. All the student needs to do is enter details of what they are studying, whether they have any kind of prior training or have developed any extracurricular skills such as dancing or acting. After this, the portal will suggest in which area you can go after completing your graduation, what additional kind of training you need, and more. Many students are already accessing this. However, our graduation degree syllabus is not entirely job market-specific.

Q. Do you find the students eager to enter the job market after graduation?

Here you can say that we are quite demotivated by the demotivation of students, because in our experience we have seen that whenever we ask the students how many of them would want to go to service after graduation, you will see that more than 500 hands will be raised, but after that, when you arrange some course or some training for their grooming, not more than 5 to 10 students will join. For example, I can tell you that for this training of government workers, the fees are very nominal (100 rupees per month). When we checked, there were many applications, so the intention was good, but when we told them to come and join the class, only 50 students showed up. Similarly, for the beautician course, which is more costly (3,000 rupees for the entire course) and is a 30-hour course, 70 students showed interest. But only 10 students joined. So, there is a gap between their intention and their effort. Planning without execution is something that students need to consciously avoid doing. If you have a dream, follow it, but it requires effort, not just intention.

Q. What should the students do to overcome this?

For instance, sometimes when we organise a placement session and we ask outside agencies to come and conduct interviews, we find that students don’t turn up. Students should appear for these interviews not just because it could result in them finding work but because they can gain valuable experience.

Q. Why do you think they don’t come?

Because they are not trained or groomed, and so they don’t have that self-confidence to face the interview board. Whenever we conducted campus interviews for job placements in the past, very few students came. Sometimes only three students or, at the most, five students appeared. This is a very unfortunate and demotivating situation. The college wants to do a lot for the students. The students should learn to take advantage of what is being given to them. It is a two-way process.

Q. As an institution that has taken up the mission of providing education to women from all sections of society, what particular steps will the college take to promote its students to stand at the forefront?

We have big NCC and NSS groups. NCC students go to camps, and it is a learning experience that will train them for life in the skills of survival. Our NCC students have bagged medals. Including prestigious governor medals over several years (2019, 2020, and 2022). With NSS students, we do special camps so that they can go to other institutions. For the last three years, we have introduced this scheme called “Spring Board.” Here I must mention that our teachers have done a commendable job of conducting the training involved. What we do is choose local Bengali-medium girls’ schools. From these, we chose around ten class 12 students. For 30 hours, they are trained in different modules, which include personality development, leadership quality generation, and women’s hygiene. They are also taught to operate Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. Our students, too, are exposed to this kind of digital training. To deal with certain problems, we have introduced different types of training. For instance, we have noticed that, in spite of having received digital training, when the time came to check the portals of different colleges and institutes to fill out application forms or make online payments,these girls would often go to cyber cafes, where they shell out hefty amounts just to fill out and submit the form. Keeping this in mind, our teachers train them to use their mobile phones as computers and train them to generate forms through mobile phones, as most students have mobile phones and do not have laptops, PCs, etc. in their homes. This is very useful training, as all admissions are online nowadays. Even basic yoga to keep fit is taught in this scheme.

Q. How do the students respond to these training sessions?

They find it very effective. It is a practical guide to what they can do after Madhyamik or after higher secondary. They learn which subjects are taught in which colleges and where and how they can apply. All this training is packed into thirty hours, spanning almost a month for two to three hours a day. The first two years (2021 and 2022) of Springboard training were conducted online because of the pandemic. In 2023, we did it offline. Our teachers went there and trained them physically. So, this is one of our flagship projects that we did for the empowerment of women, not only for our students but also for the outside girl children as well.

Q. It’s said there’s no end to learning and no limit to how much you might learn from someone. During your many years spent in teaching, has there ever been a student you came across and were able to take away something valuable from them? Or perhaps even a fellow teacher or colleague—anything that springs to mind?

You can definitely learn something or another from everyone. Just like this is my first experience with one of my students interviewing me (smiles). We tried to introduce this internship scheme even before this CCF for NEP by Calcutta University was introduced. For the last two years, 2022 and 2023, when the internship was not under the syllabus, we tried to promote internship among students, and we conducted stakeholder meetings where we invited outside agencies and other colleges with some guardians and students as well. We always requested that these outside agencies take our students as interns; they didn’t even have to give a stipend. Just to give them the experience, they would give their time and labour to learn how different the office is and how much different the office environment is from their class environment. We started this even before this CU syllabus was introduced, but we never got that much of a response. Students said that this wasn’t a part of the syllabus and that due to classes, exams, tuition, etc., they couldn’t attend this training. They were not at all interested. But when this came through the syllabus introduced by CU, we just left it to them to do it. Because our primary aim was that students must be aware that they have to get going.You have to stand on your own two feet and start to move.

It doesn’t always have to be about going from college to tuition and then exams. No. No, you cannot go like this in today’s world. You have to get going. You have to prove that you are different from others. Otherwise, if your goal is to stand on your feet, that will not happen or be possible without your own motivation.

So, when this internship scheme came under the syllabus, we told the students to go and choose their own area and which agency they wanted to go to and get trained. It was amazing that most of the students managed to find it on their own. They did it. At first, we were a bit sceptical about whether they would be able to do it or not. We are leaving it to them. Now the reports that are coming from different departments indicate that they are very fine with it. So, what I or we learned from the students is that if they want to do something, then they can do it, but the point is that they do not want to put in that extra effort. So long as they are fed, they will not do anything on their own. Whenever you just throw them in the field, they can perhaps do it. That is something I learned from the students.

Q. Is there something you’d want the members of the student council of JDC to know from your gathered experience over all these years, from being a former student to professor to principal, that might be of help to many going through critical years of their learning journey and that will effectively shape us and our careers in the future?

Definitely, something that I specifically want to tell the students is that today’s times are very competitive. And at the same time, what goes on mostly is that most of our students are single children, or at most, they have just one sibling; they are a pampered lot. Except for a few, most students do get pampered a lot in their homes, so there are two opposite scenarios. At home, when they get pampered, they just demand something from their parents, which is usually met, and when they don’t get that outside, they get hurt. But at the same time, when they come out of their homes into society, they should realise it is a fiercely competitive world. It is no longer a cocoon, and you have to emerge from it and face the fact that not everything will be fine all the time. That is not the actual situation; somehow, at some point, you will have to face the reality of society. You have to come out of that cocoon. It’s better to prepare yourself while you are in that cocoon, just like when you are growing in your mother’s womb. The mother protects the baby, but at the same time, it grows up so that when it comes outside, it can develop to stand on its own two feet and walk on its own two feet. It’s better when you are in the cocoon up until your Madhyamik, uccha-Madhyamik. During graduation, sometimes even post-graduation, when you are under the supervision of your parents, teachers, or friends, it is still a cocoon. But you have to learn how to be strong and how to step out strongly and confidently. You have to learn that in the learning period, you might fail at times, but then there are our hands that will help you stand up. But when you are out into the real society, the real life, there will be no hand that will support you. You have to stand on your own two feet. You have to learn. So, my advice to the students as a whole is to learn how to stand solid and how to be strong while you are in the cocoon and in the pampered situation. Because that situation will not prevail forever. And the second point that I want to tell the students, which is very woman-specific, is that, in a broad sense, it is still a male-dominated society. Don’t hurt anybody, but don’t let anybody hurt you either. You must have the courage so that nobody will be allowed to hurt you. But don’t hurt anybody too.