Hyderabad: From working on a lunar rover for an ISRO robotics competition and developing a 3D-printed bionic arm to designing the legs of a quadruped robot, Hyderabad-based Syed Shafee Hashmi has spent his early career turning mechanical concepts into working machines.Now, the systems engineer in the aerospace and defence industry is putting that experience to use mentoring engineering students.Hashmi has been training students for three years, starting with his own college juniors and, more recently, students from other colleges as well. The guidance is mostly project-based – helping with a design, resolving a technical problem, checking calculations or figuring out how to take an idea forward. Most interactions happen online, with in-person meetings when a project needs closer, hands-on attention.It comes from his own time as a student, he says, when he had no shortage of resources, including material available online, but little idea how to use them or where to begin. What helped him, he said, was guidance from seniors and professors.“When I was a student, I was clueless about what needed to be done. There were plenty of resources available, but we didn’t know how to utilise them. I do not want that to happen to budding engineers, so I mentor whoever is in need,” he told TOI.His method isn’t to simply explain a concept and leave it there. He pushes students to build something with what they are learning.“Whatever you are learning and whatever resources you have, make a project out of it. When you build something and run it, you learn much more about it. Textbooks cannot give you that knowledge,” he said.The bigger problem, Hashmi feels, lies in the basics. “There is a gap between what students learn and what they need to do in the real world. Whether it is design, manufacturing or simulation, the basics are the initial phase of everything. If your basics are not clear, you don’t even know how to initiate a process. Students can learn through online courses and the resources available to them, but they also need to be attentive and teach themselves. When I went for interviews, I expected questions on advanced concepts, but I was asked basic questions. The interviewer told me that engineers often do not have an idea about the basics. If your basics are not clear, how are you going to work?” he said.Much of Hashmi’s mentoring was initially through student teams tied to Aakruti, a national-level student design and engineering competition, though his involvement doesn’t stop there. He has also guided students through a fire-extinguishing bot and a planetary-cycloidal gearbox, helping with their mechanical design, calculations and development.Hashmi believes that students need to move beyond learning concepts in the abstract and start putting them to use, because that is where, he says, the real learning happens.
