International School of Engg opens centre in Hyderabad

International School of Engineering (ISE), a US-based institute offering advanced engineering courses, today opened its first centre in India at Hyderabad.

Beginning in August, the school would offer courses for working professionals in two streams of business analytics and optimisation, and high-performance enterprise product engineering. In the US, the ISE is based in Carnegie Mellon University and offers several master's courses for regular students as well as working professionals.

According to Dakshinamurthy V Kolluru, president, ISE, the Indian industry needs to move beyond the labour cost arbitrage to doing high-end engineering in product development, applied industrial research and technology consulting. ISE was an attempt to address the need for training in such advanced areas by bringing together academia and industry onto a single platform, he said.

ISE offers a 30-day (weekend only) Certificate in Engineering Excellence course in the two streams, and an 80-day two-year Executive M Tech programme in association with Gitam University. The fees for the first course is Rs 70,000, while it would be in the range of Rs 2.75 - 3.25 lakh for the M Tech course.

Kolluru said ISE’s mentors were drawn from several top US universities like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Yale among others, and also from IITs, Deloitte, Microsoft, Bank of America and Reserve Bank of India.

The intake for the two courses is 30 each. While the minimum qualifications are B Tech, MCA, or MSc in computer science or mathematics, exceptional candidates with a diploma in engineering would also be considered on a case by case.

Apart from these, Kolluru said, the applicants would also be assessed on their performance in an open contest called Extreme Engineering. This was to ensure that students are of a sufficient calibre to engage the faculty in such advanced topics.

Kolluru said ISE would be made a university eventually, and is building a campus at a 50-acre site in Maheshwaram in Hyderabad and also a second campus in Visakhapatnam. The Hyderabad campus is expected to be ready in two years, while the programmes would be conducted at Novotel hotel in the meantime.