I have been terribly busy since February this year. As a faculty member, I have taken some extra credit loads. On top of that, I served as the Chair of the Curricula and Syllabi Development Committee. This committee has developed curricula and syllabi for six programs: BSc (Eng.) in CSE, BSc in CS, MSc in CSE, BSc in AI, BSc in Data Science and Machine Learning, and BSc in Cyber Security. We already had working curricula for CSE, CS, and MSc CSE; this time, we upgraded them. We will launch the other three programs soon.

Last week, our external reviewers, Dr M Kaykobad and Dr Md Mostafa Akbar, finally reviewed and signed off on the curricula for BSc (Eng.) in CSE and MSc in CSE.

I learned a lot from the process.

1.

A curriculum is not just a compilation of course descriptions. It is a vision. Every vision is political; therefore, a curriculum is political.

2.

For a better curriculum, you need to understand the national and global economy, institutional finance, national policy, market demand, and international relations. For example, you really need to understand when a recession occurs, what stagflation is, how industrial policy works, why semiconductor dependency matters, and how Bangladesh can maintain balanced international relations with the United States, China, India, Russia, and Iran. Then suddenly, curriculum design is no longer innocent. Just three days before the election, the Yunus government signed the U.S.–Bangladesh Agreement on Reciprocal Trade; then the new government moved again with the Chinese Economic and Industrial Zone in Anwara, on government land, while pushing high-tech investment, including semiconductor chip manufacturing. Now read the situation properly: Washington is watching, Beijing is waiting, Delhi is calculating, Moscow and Tehran are not just names on a map, and YOU KNOW WHO is always standing behind the curtain. So yes, we need VLSI. We need semiconductor design. We need cybersecurity. We need AI infrastructure. A curriculum is not just an academic document; it is a survival map.

3.

Bureaucrats do not like updating a curriculum. But if you want to implement a curriculum, you must deal with bureaucrats. Vision alone does not move through institutions; vision needs paperwork, patience, pressure, and sometimes a very cold face.

4.

A curriculum can create jobs. That is why management also becomes cautious. A new program means new courses, new teachers, new labs, new budgets, new committees, new responsibilities, and new political equations inside the institution. So a curriculum does not merely organize knowledge; it redistributes power.

5.

You need visionary people to design a long-lasting curriculum. A curriculum cannot be designed by people who only count credit hours. Credit hours are necessary, of course, but a discipline does not emerge from credit hours alone. A discipline emerges when courses begin to speak to one another, when mathematics prepares computation, when computation prepares intelligence, when intelligence prepares industry, and when industry returns as a national question.

6.

But the most important lessons I learned came in two dimensions. In the technical dimension, I went through almost every course description and had the chance to understand how courses relate to one another and how a good discipline gradually emerges. In the leadership dimension, I learned that designing a curriculum requires a courageous and visionary team.

Such people are rare.