Success Runs in the Family –
Bhatias Build on their
UD Engineering Experience

Kamlesh Bhatia, Research Fellow at the DuPont Company’s Experimental Station, was delighted to learn, late in 2006, that his daughter Sujata had been selected to receive the University of Delaware Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement.  But he wasn’t surprised.

All four of his adult children—Sunita (1992, 1994M), Surita (1995), Sujata (1999, 1999M), and Krishan (2000)—are graduates of the UD College of Engineering, Sunita in electrical engineering, Krishan in mechanical engineering, and Surita and Sujata in chemical engineering.

All went on to earn doctoral degrees from highly respected schools:  University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, and Princeton.  In addition to Sujata’s Presidential Citation, they have won scholarships, medals, prestigious grants and fellowships, and other awards.  They have been valedictorians.  And despite the fact that all four earned their degrees in engineering, they are also talented in such areas as art, writing, and music.

Sunita is now a senior staff engineer at The Johns Hopkins University, Surita is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Sujata is a medical research scientist in Central Research & Development at the DuPont Company, and Krishan is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rowan University.

“The amazing thing about this family,” says Senior Assistant Dean Michael L. Vaughan in the UD College of Engineering, “is that there was no discernable pressure at home to achieve excellence. The parents simply created an atmosphere that enabled their children to motivate themselves.”

A chemical engineer himself, Kamlesh Bhatia made no demands that his children major in engineering.  He and his wife, from families of teachers, did, however, place tremendous value on education.

“I don’t think we did anything different from any other parents,” he says.  “The first requirement for success is to be blessed or gifted with intelligence.  It’s the parents’ duty to provide the environment for that gift to flourish and direct it in a way to provide excitement for the child.”

“My wife always made sure they did their homework,” he continues, “and I helped them with things like science projects.  We were also both active with the schools our kids attended.”

For the four Bhatia kids, those schools were not pricy private schools but public schools in Delaware’s Christina School District.  “My wife and I both went to public schools,” Bhatia says.  “My philosophy is that education is not only about learning what’s in the books but also about getting an all-around education from interacting with people from all walks of life.”

“When I came to the United States,” he continues, “one of the things that impressed me most was that U.S. culture was a great ‘leveler,’ in contrast to other cultures, where social stratification was the norm.  I immediately felt an attraction to the ideas of Yankee ingenuity and the can-do attitude I saw here.”

The Bhatias bought a home in the suburbs of Newark, Delaware, near Christiana High School, and, unlike many families that “move up” as their financial circumstances improve, they stayed put.  “We lived near most of the schools that our children attended as they grew up, and that was important to us,” he says.  “We didn’t want the disruption of moving.”

Bhatia credits his oldest daughter, Sunita, with “paving the way” for the others.  “She had the toughest time,” he says, “because when she started school in the late 1970s, there weren’t that many Indian children in our area.”  But Sunita went on to finish high school in three years with a 4.0 average.

“That was one of the other things I liked about the public schools here,” Bhatia says.  “They accommodated my kids.  When my second daughter, Surita, came home from fourth grade crying, I found out that she was upset because she wasn’t learning anything new.  The school agreed to put her with older kids for some of the subjects where she was ahead of her peers.”

Bhatia learned one of his most important parenting lessons from his own mother:  a focus on not just the how but also the why.  “I didn’t want my kids to learn mechanistically,” he says.  “If they were doing math, for example, I wanted them to know why they were carrying out a particular operation.”

He also made sure their projects were meaningful.  For example, Krishan, who was interested in archery, chose ballistics as the topic of a high school science project, which enabled him to understand the physics of shooting—without even realizing it, Krishan was learning engineering methodology.

Overall, Bhatia admits that he’s not sure how much each factor contributed to the success of his four children.  He does know, however, that none of them had to go farther than their own home and the schools in their hometown to get the foundations of a great education.
“We might have given them the building blocks,” Bhatia says, “but credit for their development really belongs to their dedicated Christina School District teachers and UD professors, as well as the many special school programs outside the regular classroom.”