Southern India
The students you meet in India are almost all interested in graduate education. The fairs in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai are 90% graduate studies fairs and they are well attended.
Again the students here are passionate people and eager to give you as much information as possible in the few minutes they have in front of you. I ended up scheduling several interviews both before and after each of these fairs to try and get more time with some of the qualified and interested students.
The Life Sciences program turned out to be a popular program. Of course many of the students were interested in the computer science MS and PhD but I steered many of the to the Center for the Study of Biological Complexity, especially the ones who had already done course work in the field of Bioinformatics. The students who had backgrounds in biology, chemistry and applied math were also drawn to this center and the life sciences. This program, I told them, is a perfect example of how VCU encourages interdisciplinary study and is committed to providing the best resources available to its students to succeed. After all, I continued, how couldn't a building named after our university president not have wireless access in the student lounge and classroom, how could it not have GIS labs you could access 24 hours a day or modern research equipment? It surely would be an insult to not provide the best.
So these students are eager to pursue their degree work in either the biology/genomics track or the bioinformatics/quant track. And of course there is always the PhD in Integrated Life Sciences if they want to pursue there studies further.
There are large educational systems in India at the Federal/State/Regional levels. Two examples of this are JNTU in Hyderabad and the University of Madras in Chennai. JNTU is a State university with over 230 ENGINEERING schools alone affiliated with it. They annually send 30-40% of their students to the United States for postgraduate education, mainly in the hard sciences and engineering.
The University of Madras is similar. Situated on the southeast coast of India its main campus, situated on 100 meters from the beach, is home to 5,000 students though the university services the needs of over 300,000 Indians. It is a very comprehensive university and also has a mirror for Dr. Joe Morolla, director for the Center for Teaching Excellence here at VCU. VCU wisely put resources in a very energetic and bright man and asked him to create a center of learning for faculty who are looking to improve themselves as professors, but might not have the time, to say, seek out the newest technology for the classroom. They can go to see Dr. Morolla (or he will come to them) for training and to test new tools. Ultimately, these efforts benefit our students and the University of Madras has done the same thing. It will be interesting to put these two men in touch to see what they can learn from each other.
As we have left India, I look back and admire a growing, energetic, passionate culture and student population eager to improve themselves, searching for opportunity. We are lucky at VCU to have the programs and infrastructure to assist many of these students. They are worth it. As I told many of them, education is a two way street. They benefit from the education they receive here, and we benefit from our improved reputation once they become successful in their fields. I believe that about many of the students I met and I look forward to seeing them on campus.