When I took up the role of Adjunct Professor and Board of Studies Member at Lakireddy Bali Reddy College of Engineering in 2024, some colleagues were surprised. Why would a senior industry professional spend time in the classroom? The answer, I've come to believe, is that the question itself reveals the problem.
The Gap Is Real — and Costly
There is a persistent mismatch between what engineering graduates know and what industry needs them to do on day one. This is not a criticism of academic institutions — curricula take years to develop and update, while technology moves in months. But the consequence is that companies spend significant resources reskilling fresh engineers, and graduates spend their first one to two years feeling underprepared for the practical demands of their roles.
In power electronics specifically, the gap is acute. A student who has studied DC-DC converter theory may never have designed for EMI compliance, written a derating specification, or conducted a failure mode analysis on a real product. These are not advanced skills — they are table stakes for any practicing engineer. Yet they rarely appear in a standard curriculum.
"The most important thing I can give a student is not a formula — it is a way of thinking about a problem that doesn't exist in any textbook yet."
What I Bring to the Classroom
As an Adjunct Professor, my contribution is not to replace theoretical instruction — the faculty at LBRCE handle that with great competence — but to complement it with industrial context. In practical terms, this means:
- Walking students through real product failure cases and the root cause analysis process I've used in industry
- Explaining how standards and compliance requirements shape design decisions from the first schematic
- Introducing reliability engineering concepts — derating, lifetime calculation, FMEA — that are industry-standard but often absent from university courses
- Connecting students to current research challenges and showing how academic theory connects to unsolved industrial problems
The Board of Studies Role: Shaping Curriculum
As a BoS member, I have a different kind of influence — at the level of what gets taught, not just how. This is, if anything, the more impactful role. Curriculum decisions made today will shape the engineers graduating in four years. If those decisions are made without industry input, the gap widens further.
Practically, this has involved advocating for greater emphasis on power quality, reliability engineering, and hands-on laboratory components in the EEE curriculum. It has also involved introducing case-based learning modules that frame technical content around real engineering problems rather than abstract exercises.
A Call to Fellow Industry Professionals
If you are a senior engineer or leader in any technical field, I want to make a direct case: your knowledge has a shelf life in industry, but it compounds in academia. A framework you use daily to solve engineering problems could equip a hundred students to enter the profession better prepared than you were. That is a return on investment that no product launch can match.
The time commitment need not be enormous. A single guest lecture, a jury role at a student competition, a mentorship relationship with a final-year project team — each of these contributes more than you might imagine. The students who remember them will carry that knowledge into their careers for decades.
The gap between industry and academia will not close itself. It closes one interaction at a time, by people who decide it is worth their time. I hope more of us decide that it is.