Hemlatha Munamgi
For 30 years, Hemalatha has taught from the front of a classroom at Lakireddy Bali Reddy College of Engineering in Andhra Pradesh. She finished her postgraduate degree in 1998, when the tools available to a young lecturer were textbooks, chalk, and whatever she could carry in her head. She was always the kind of student who did well – a university topper, the kind professors remembered. But knowing a subject and applying it, she says, turned out to be two different things.
The gap in her understanding was bridged by NPTEL, one course at a time. It started as an instruction from her college: register for these courses. She did, dutifully, and then something shifted. The assessments were not built for recall; they asked her to apply what she knew and approach concepts from an angle a textbook never would. “Whatever I was previously,” she says, “I was stronger after learning the course.” She went on to complete nearly 35 of them: Java, Python, data structures, and eventually machine learning and AI, which she found genuinely difficult despite her computer science background. Of all of them, C programming is the one she returns to. She had always been confident she could solve anything in C. The course, she says, made her realize there was still more to learn.
Her days were structured around her learning rather than the other way around. Her college is over an hour from home, and that commute became her lecture hall. She studied in the gaps of her working life: free periods, evenings, the stretch of road between one place and another. When exams demanded more than the margins of a day, she took two days’ leave and gave the course her full attention until it was done.
NPTEL provided benefits that extended beyond her personal knowledge. Her assessments evolved to become more applied and focused on real understanding, rather than merely memorizing information for the sake of passing exams. They were designed so that students would retain the concepts long after the test was over. She began teaching across platforms she hadn’t used before: YouTube, blogs, Google Meet. Her college noticed. She became a technical trainer, and colleagues who watched her career shift started enrolling in courses themselves.
Then came the opportunity she hadn’t been looking for.
Having excelled in several courses offered by IIT Madras, she received an invitation to apply for a position as an instructor for the BS degree program.
She went through the selection rounds and was chosen. For the past 2 years, she has taught System Commands and Introduction to C Programming to students spread across the country, a role that didn’t exist in any plan she had made for herself.
The impact of her journey has extended to her family. Her son, currently in his first year of a B.Tech in computer science, is set to join the same BS Degree program in Aerospace, a field she hopes he will pursue in honour of his elder brother, a pilot.
Her next chapter is taking shape as she plans to create a YouTube channel focused on PowerBI and DevOps, skills she acquired through industry training.
She aims to share this knowledge in the same way that NPTEL imparted learning to her.
Her advice for anyone undecided carries the plainness of someone who has lived it: don’t stop learning, and don’t let age or experience convince you that you already have enough.
~written by Elsa Prasad