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Net Gains (Dec 16, 97) |
Education Times (http://www.educationtimes.com) has a special
placement feature on their website that focuses on the basic fundaes
of placements - the why, how, when, and where. The section looks
at placements from the perspective of students, institutes, and
most importantly, that of the corporate world.
The part that looked most interesting was the Profiles section
that featured some of Bombay's better management colleges - Jamnalal
Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), SP Jain Institute
of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Narsee Monjee Institute of
Management Studies (NMIMS), and KJ Somaiya Institute of Management
Studies & Research (SIMSR). Except for SP Jain, the other
three had links to pages on the web, which surfers could follow
to dig deeper for information.
JBIMS, Bombay's premiere management institute is the first and
only management college to exclusively have a .edu domain. Incidentally,
a dot edu is the standard followed worldwide for education related
sites. JBIMS Online (http://www.jbims.edu) has everything anyone
would want to know about JBIMS - the college, the courses, the
faculty, the placement process, & competitions and awards
won by the students. Though the site has two versions - separate
for shell and for TCP/IP users, the TCP/IP version is not loaded
with graphics. There are just a couple of images - one being that
of the certificate awarded to JBIMS for being among the top 25
Asian business schools, the only one from Bombay ! There's also
a special section for wannabe management students to guide them
through the entire entrance process.
SIMSR, part of the Somaiya group of colleges, has a pretty comprehensive
set of pages up at http://www.qlcomm.com/somaiya. The Somaiya
group of colleges (Arts, Science, Commerce, Engineering, Management)
all share a common dot edu domain - www.somaiya.edu. However,
the latter currently has very sketchy information about the college.
One's left wondering why the pages are still on another server
when they have a server of their own. However, the SIMSR pages
have a neat and simple look and feel to them, and even have the
entire student profile up for easy online reference.
Finally coming to the NMIMS site (http://www.nmims.com), the
nagging question is why has an educational institute settled for
a commercial domain name (.com domain names are for commercial
entities). Wouldn't a www.nmims.edu have made more sense ? Statutory
warning : This is the most graphic intensive site I have come
across in the past 2 ½ years on the net. I logged on at 28.8
Kbps with images on, and discovered that the images used were
B-I-G ! The site gave a whole new meaning to the abbreviation
WWW - not World Wide Web, but World Wide Wait ! The homepage took
35 minutes to completely download. Good design requires a homepage
to completely download in under 2 minutes and to be less than
20 K bytes, but this took the cake - the homepage was 1.83 Mb
! Ouch ! Seeing my phone bill run up, I logged out. Do yourself
a favour and visit this site with images off.
Though these colleges have made a start in the right direction
online, there's still a long way to go before the sites become
a one stop shop for information about their colleges. Here's wishing
the students all the best !