Posting for a friend who wishes to remain anonymous: I'm a mechanical engineering by education and one thing I have noticed is there are no such options availa

Posting for a friend who wishes to remain anonymous: I'm a mechanical engineering by education and one thing I have noticed is there are no such options available for mechanical engineers. I remember sweating it out at the workshop fabricating a continuous variable transmission (automatic transmission) unit by hand from scratch. I went on to work with a "leading education company" in India and we rolled out an "innovative" program for engineering college students. I was fresh out of bschool and was mainly involved in preparing the presentations to be presented to the top management. The plan was supposed to connect the student community with the industry to facilitate final year projects for "free". I was happy because this entire "outsourcing of projects" was always one of my pet peeves. I later found out that the real plan was to do the above, but do it slowly and when the students were running out of time, make them pay up and "sell" them a project. The service didn't take off and boy was I secretly glad! What did I learn from the exercise? 1. There is a booming industry to sell projects. 2. There is immense demand. The moment we started advertising, we got tens of thousands of calls every day. 3. The students just want to get done with the projects. Why? They already have job offers from one of the various software companies and this is just a formality to get their degree certificate. 4. They just aren't interested. 5. We approached engineering colleges as part of marketing and most directors/principals we met were @$$holes who asked us just one question - Will this help me get more admissions for the next academic year? 6. Most HODs wanted a cut out of the entire deal. 7. Demand for projects (in decreasing order) EC>EE>CS/IT>EI>Mech/Civil I do not know the solution to this problem, but the entire ecosystem is flawed.