Orientation that actually oriented: A storytelling seminar for new engineering students at NIT Andhra Pradesh
- Rutvi Chudasama
- Sep 9
- 2 min read
Engineering orientation usually goes: "Here's the Wi-Fi password, don't cheat, good luck." But NIT Andhra Pradesh's Student Welfare Body decided to rebel. They invited Tellable's co-founder Ayyappan Ramachandran to conduct a storytelling seminar for engineering students, teaching 500 freshers about being human. Revolutionary, isn't it?
Using storytelling to teach life skills to Engineering students - An insightful seminar
The seminar started with a career plot twist: Ayyappan’s own life story. How he went from calculating molecular weights to calculating human impact and eventually traded his chemical engineering degree for creative entrepreneurship proved that sometimes the best career advice is "ignore career advice.”
His secret? Three laws of being human that might just give a good competition to Newton's three laws of motion.
How to not get replaced by AI easily
Curiosity: The superpower that makes you ask "Why?" when everyone else says "That's how it has always been done." Elon Musk didn't revolutionise rockets by accepting that they had to be expensive and disposable. He asked, "What if we just... caught them back?"
Empathy: The radical idea that other people's experiences matter as much as your own. Stop building for yourself. Build for the person who will actually use your product while crying happy tears and thanking you silently.
Communication: The art of making your brilliant technical solution sound less like aliens and more like humans. If you can't explain your brilliant solution to your grandmother or your young nephew, perhaps, it is not that brilliant.
While everyone else reads technical manuals, we advocate for novels. Our reasoning: Fiction teaches you about humans. Humans buy your products, fund your startups, and decide your salary. And that's why, understanding people might be more valuable than understanding algorithms.
Why creativity should lead education
Traditional engineering education says: Pick a lane, stay in it, become really good at one thing. Our message: Become a multi-dimensional human being. Learn psychology with your programming. Study literature with your algorithms. Be the person AI can't replace because you are too wonderfully, unpredictably human.
For example, Tellable's head of ops Sruthi Venkateswaran dabbles in combining psychology with Kathak to deliver movement therapy, creating something that didn't exist before. That is not career confusion, that is innovation. You can't Google your way to that kind of thinking.
The session gave students an unpopular thought: Your most valuable skill in today's times isn't coding or calculating – it is being irreplaceably human. Students left knowing that curiosity beats conformity, empathy beats ego, and good communication beats good code any day.
We believe NIT's experiment worked because it addressed the real question: How do you prepare engineers for a world where technical skills are commoditized but human insight isn't? And the answer is: You get a chemical engineer to teach them about humanity through storytelling. What an irony!
Want to experience this irony live in person? Let's talk.