Research internship to earn at least 20 credits in the new UG courses – Times of India

NEW DELHI: To boost research at undergraduate level, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has prepared draft guidelines. A minimum of 20 credits of the 160 credits in a four-year degree programme will be earned via such research activities. The guidelines stated objective is that institutionalisation of research at UG level will play a pivotal role in catalysing inter-disciplinary/ multi-disciplinary/ trans-disciplinary and translational research culture. The guidelines will be made public for stakeholders’ suggestions on Wednesday.

In line with the vision set by the National Education Policy 2020, the “Guidelines for Research Internship with Faculty and Researchers at HEIs and Research Institutions” aims at competencies to be developed during internship and spells out duration and slots of internship, exposure to a real-world work environment, quality assurance and caring for research intern by parent HEI.

According to M Jagadesh Kumar, chairperson, UGC, “Internship provides practical experience to the students. The ability to integrate classroom knowledge with practical problems is important and internship time can also be used by students to learn how to be part of teams and how to collaborate with people of different skill sets and experience. UGC, therefore, encourages the HEIs to put processes in place for providing internship opportunities to the students.”
As per the draft, a copy of which is with the TOI, “The newly introduced course structure in the NEP 2020 envisages the integration of research component in degree programs and specifically for the Four-Year Degree Program with bachelor’s degree (research) has the fourth year focussed on developing research competencies in students. This calls for developing a system of offering research internships to undergraduate students with defined levels of competencies required for pursuing research. The framework would specify how the HEIs can support the interns as a provider or an organizer, how research organization or research center/ laboratory at industry can support research internship as providers.”

Apart from gaining milti-disciplinary skills, the UG level research expects to give students an exposure to the societal challenges through rural/ social internships and getting them trained for social innovations, familiarize them with research methods, analytical tools and techniques, train the students in writing research proposals, scientific reports, presentations, and/ or manuscripts for publication as well as promote academic, professional developments.

The guidelines also speaks about facilitating researchers in HEIs/ research organizations/ industrial R&D labs/ other nationally reputed institutions/ organisations to look for innovative solutions through research interns and collaborations between HEIs, research organizations and industrial research centres for supporting research internship programme.

Research internships is being divided into two categories — one that enhances employability and the other which develop research aptitude of an individual student.

The internships aims at imparting knowledge on project development and its execution, decision making/ confidence development, working in team/ coordinating in team, critical, creative thinking and problem-solving, ethical values, reference of resource persons in the field and simulation-based/ online module development for a virtual research internship.