ANANTAPUR: Hone up your creative visualisation skills for achieving excellence and give up the practice of memorising and reproducing the syllabus, that was in vogue up to Intermediate, as the practice would not longer be helpful in engineering courses, K. Hemachandra Reddy, Director of Academy and Planning in JNTU, Anantapur, exhorted students on Wednesday.

Creativity and commitment coupled with communication skills are the much-needed traits needed for engineering students, he told students in The Hindu Education Plus career counselling workshop, sponsored by Vignan Engineering Colleges, in the conference hall of AF Ecology Centre in Anantapur, which was filled to the brim with boys and girls who aspired to join engineering, medicine and allied courses.

Students and their parents, who were glued to their seats for nearly four hours, heard the subject experts with rapt attention and enthusiastically interacted with them.

Their faced beamed with contentment on getting a clear picture on the way they should go forward in choosing the right course that suits their interests and the college they should opt for to make a mark.

One should continue to be creative and committed even after securing seats in an engineering course of their choice without giving scope for slackness if they have to make a mark in life as a professional, Prof. Hemachandra Reddy said.

ECE and EEE offered good potential despite the downslide in the software boom, G.V. Sivakrishna Rao, Principal, Sri Krishnadevaraya University Engineering College, Anantapur, said. Those completing EEE have equal opportunities on par with computer engineering and students strong in Maths and Physics should go in for ECE or EEE, he advised.

Y. Padmanabha Reddy, Principal of Pharmacy College, Anantapur, said the State has 281 pharmacy colleges and some more were in the pipeline. Y.V. Vidyasankar and Harinath Reddy, Assistant Directors of Horticulture, spoke on the importance of career planning like the one offered by The Hindu and recalled lack of such guidance in their student days.