IIT-Hyderabad focuses on reducing stress

Hyderabad: In order to boost the students’ personality skills, IIT-Hyderabad will make personality development a mandatory course from the next academic year.

It was also found that most students are confining themselves to the hostel rooms with their gadgets, avoiding any conversation with fellow students. In order to overcome this issue, the institute has already started ‘pod coordinators’ who would make sure that there is a quality discussion taking place among the students.

A pod is the common area between eight rooms and there is one person to manage it as the coordinator for the eight occupants.

“This is purely a student-run initiative supported by the institution so as to ensure everybody is connected with each other. The respective pod coordinators have their WhatsApp groups through which they communicate and decide when they can conveniently meet once a week. Also, they meet over lunch or dinner for quality discussion once in a month. The objective of the whole exercise is to develop concept of togetherness among the students,” said the IITH official.

As of now, students have their own rooms, the institute is aiming to construct a separate hostel to accommodate two students per room at least for the first year, so that the students would get in touch with the fellow mates. It was said that the students coming from ‘coaching centres’ are struggling to unlearn what they have already learnt.

“A major emphasis is being placed in reducing stress levels of students through various initiatives such as having faculty and alumni mentor students, conducting stress relieving sessions by renowned psychologists and motivational speakers,” said Prof. B S Murty, Director of IIT-H.

Further adding to the efforts, the institute is aiming at introducing mandatory and credit based courses forpersonality development.