The joys of supervising I

Long ago, I wrote about an undergrad, who fooled me into believing that he was genuinely interested in doing a summer project with me, but eventually decided to do this project elsewhere.  This student has also displayed some rather negative characteristics in class.  For example, from time to time, he gets upset if he does not understand something in class and blames his teachers from previous years for not teaching him properly.  He had also been occasionally heard to make fatalistic statements about how he has ruined his life by joining N1.

For good or for worse, he happens to be the only student in his batch majoring in my STEM field.  He is also interested in my research specialization.  In the beginning of this semester, he approached me to supervise him for a reading course.  I agreed, but also asked him to regularly attend the classes of an advanced course  in my research area that I was teaching final year students.  I also had a frank conversation with him about his frequent outbursts in classes and counseled him to learn and take responsibility for his weaknesses.  The student assured me that he will work very hard and will not repeat his misbehavior.

Soon after this, my colleagues noted a change in his attitude.  He identified his weaknesses and took remedial action.  He also became much more receptive in his classes.  He sat through the lectures of courses which he had already taken before, but wanted to learn better.  Even though he was auditing my course, he worked very hard in it, participated actively in class and made a lot of progress.  In the evenings, I noticed that he would spend time with my PhD student, working on practice problems and assignments.  Towards the middle of the course, he identified a topic which interested him and decided to  study that in detail for his reading course.

A couple of weeks ago, he gave a presentation on this topic.  His examiners were pleasantly surprised to see him evolve from a student with very shaky foundations to one who could study a difficult topic on his own and give a very convincing lecture on it.  His talk was neither a heavily technical talk with little context, nor a general overview with few details and lots of hand waiving.  In fact, he managed to strike just the right balance between the key technical details and the diverse applications of the technique he was talking about.  I had certainly not expected such a mature talk from this student.

Today, he also submitted his project report.  Apart from some formating issues which he has been asked to correct, I was delighted to see the effort that he had put in to write a clear and organized exposition of this topic.

Thus, between last year and this year, he has done a lot of growing up.  A little bit of guidance and direct talk proved sufficient to set him on the path forward.

This student has requested me to supervise his final year thesis.  He has also decided to stay back on campus this summer so that he can get an early start on his thesis.  Something tells me that this time around, he is committed to staying here and working with me.  I am happy to see this change in him and look forward to supervising him.  I am now looking for a suitable problem for his master's thesis.

A very friendly blogger

This post is to congratulate Professor K VijayRaghavan (Director, NCBS) on being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (pointer from the recent blog posts of Professors Abi and Rahul).

A lot has been written about his scientific accomplishments and his role in building up NCBS.  He is also active on the blogging network.

As Rahul points out,

``he is one of those scientists always willing to speak his mind, without causing controversy, and participate civilly in online discussion: he has commented occasionally (including very recently) on this and other blogs and himself blogs at Indiabioscience."

I have benefited a lot from many of his comments on this blog and have also enjoyed his amusing take on various issues [recently, in response to my (somewhat angry) post about communication troubles between senior and younger professors at N1, he suggested that they could go out together for a beer session where each can speak their mind without offending the other!]

My initial interaction with him was very funny.  He visited this blog following a link from Abi's blog and left the following comment:

Hi New Prof in New India,
I really enjoyed this post. Its wonderful for those joining new places in particular but also for those looking for faculty positions anywhere to hear about your experiences. You write politely and well and I am sure no one will take offense if you identify the places you are writing about. N1 can only become better and even more responsive! I would love to recommend N1 to others and perhaps apply myself if only I knew where it is :-)). In any case congrats and thanks to Nanopolitan for pointing me here. Keep writing.
Best wishes
Vijay
K. VijayRaghavan, Bangalore


I am not a biologist.  Being new to the scientific community in India and somewhat misled by his comment and his simple blogger profile, I assumed that he is a postdoc entering the job market and wrote the following response:

Hi Vijay,
It is a good idea to apply widely to many institutes and not write off any new ones before visiting them.
The current generation of job-seekers in India is very lucky because of the wide variety of academic jobs available and we should take full advantage of that.


However, after reading a few more comments by him on other posts, it became very obvious that my assumption was false! So, I googled him and went ``Oops! A big oops!"

Since then, I am very careful about who I am writing to and also about offering unsolicited advice :)

I conclude this post with a very thoughtful comment by him on a post I wrote long ago about struggling between academic and administrative duties [bold emphasis added]:

``Research is a full-time job. Teaching is another full-time job. Administration need never be more than 20%-time job. Counseling students ditto. So, with time-management and prioritization the question is, how many jobs do we want to do: .2, .4, 1, 1.2, 1.4, 2, 2.2, 2.4 etc. The choice we make is substantially ours and also depends on the context.

Lets say you decide that you are passionate about research, committed to excellence in teaching and, at the same time, would like to help with committee work and student counseling. In other words you want to be a 2.4 job person. If each job takes 6 hours of work a day, we are talking about a 14 hour day and an amazing ability to partition one’s hard-drive. Not easy for the best of us. There are at least two ‘trivial’ solutions to the 14 h day problem. The first is to do all jobs badly in a 6 h day. The second is to drop research. The first trivial solution inevitably leads to the second as neglecting research is a downward spiral that makes your research eventually irrelevant. Its amazing though, that something that should take about 2.4 hours a day can lead to a crisis in one’s research and teaching. Why is this? In my view, still taking shape, the .4 job day that is taken up by counseling and committee work, particularly when done well, is an opiate that makes us feel useful. The rest of the 2 job day will be very well used even if we only used a third of that time thinking hard and working a bit (i.e. 4 hours a day). Thinking hard, consistently, is demanding on most of us ordinary folk. Rather than find ways to remedy this handicap, we do more of the opiate. Hence the downward spiral. Thus, most people don’t say no to committee work. We justify our involvement with a variety of real and virtual arguments, but we inevitably get drawn into it more than we need to, We next say that this is the cause of the demise of our research or teaching. While, it may be the other way around.
The new institutes, such as yours, have an opportunity to shake us oldies from this complacent luxury of buffaloes wallowing in our ponds and declaring that ours is the best way and but for admin work and bureaucracy we would in a better pond. The reason I say this is that there is a nontrivial, though unstable, solution to the 14 hour efficient work day. That is by keeping an institutional and individual focus on research and teaching as our primary goals with all other activities helping these. If we can manage this focus, the .4 job investment will make the 2 job goal attainable in less time. If we forget this mantra the .4 job becomes all encompassing."

Generation gap?

Like many other new institutes, the faculty at N1 almost entirely consists of young members within five to ten years of their PhD.  The associate professors (few) and full professors (fewer) can be counted on fingertips.  Our senior colleagues have substantially contributed to the growth of N1 and by their accomplishments and experience, have been able to give direction to the institute.  What I also admire about them is that they left good positions in established institutes and roughed it out in a new set up and at the same time, managed to keep their research programmes going.  Their commitment and leadership is deeply appreciated.

Sometimes, however, there is a bit of a gap in communication between the younger faculty (YF) and senior faculty (SF) members.  I would like to share an example of how something said by YF can be misinterpreted by SF and vice versa.

A lot of heated conversations are centered around the balance between teaching and research.  On joining, the message that most of us get is that while there should be no compromises in teaching undergraduate courses in our flagship programme, eventually our performance will be judged on the basis of our publications and research grants.  Those of us who did their PhD/postdocs in North American universities have had prior teaching experience and have also seen our supervisors/postdoc guides balancing and actively performing both duties.  On the other hand, many of my colleagues have joined after doing postdocs in research institutes in India and Europe.  Thus, they may not have had any teaching experience prior to joining here and have come out of a system where undergraduate education was not given much priority.

Faced with the challenges of teaching their first course and trying to carve out an independent identity in the research world simultaneously, some YFs are occasionally heard saying that their teaching duties take time away from their research work.  I would not doubt  the commitment of a colleague who says this towards teaching well.  I would only think that my colleague is dealing with time management issues, an important part of the learning curve of any faculty member and is frankly sharing his/her struggles with others.

Unfortunately, however, if our SFs hear this, more often than not, they will angrily retort and say that they had much heavier teaching loads when they started out and that YF has it much easier and therefore should not complain.  SF might even make a general statement on the lines of ``People should not make teaching an excuse for their lack of productivity."  Perhaps, SF is making a general statement, but YF will be stunned because s/he has been very productive.  Needless to say, this conversation may not end very well.

SF's reaction is based on the assumption that YF was making teaching load an excuse for weakness, where as all YF was doing was harmlessly interacting with colleagues and sharing his/her struggles.  On the other hand, even though SF made an off-hand general remark, it is next to impossible for YF to not take it personally!  Perhaps, it might have been better if SF too had shared some stories of their early career days or given some advice. While it is considered impolite to offer unsolicited advice, surely unsolicited advice is better than unsolicited criticism?

Teaching was only one example.  Similar conversations can also happen around other issues like research facilities, lab/office space, personal facilities like transport, housing etc.

On a personal note, I often don't mind when a senior says things like ``I had it much harder," provided the senior gives a concrete example and describes how s/he handled it.  I get this a lot from my father and it usually has the desired effect.
When I was describing the above situation to him the other day, his reply was:

`` In army, a junior will not dare to open his mouth when a senior is talking.  You academic people have it much easier."

I will leave it to the readers to agree or disagree with my father :)















  

Connected and unwell!

Oh well!

Perhaps, having internet at home is not such a good thing after all.

This year, I am one of the coordinators of the summer research programme at our institute.  We received a very large number of applications by email [1] and by spending an hour everyday, I was gradually processing them and forwarding them to the concerned faculty members [2].  With internet at home, however, I spent all of Sunday (morning till late night) working on this, forwarded about 500 remaining applications in one go and felt happy and relieved (and grateful to have internet at home).  Today morning, I woke up with a severe headache and could not hold myself together after teaching my morning class.  So, I had to take a day off.  Come evening and I am down with fever :-(

Oh well!!

   

[1] Yes, I am aware that a smarter method of processing applications for academic activities is by encouraging web based applications, which also sorts them out and prepares databases.  Our team of coordinators totally underestimated the number of applications that our summer programme will receive and have learnt this the hard way!


[2] This has been an interesting learning experience.  I now know the key research areas of many of my colleagues.  I also know that those colleagues who have words like cancer, nano, cosmology, neuro  or anything "quantum" on their research profiles are likely to receive the maximum number of applications from students with very ambitious research programmes.  For example, one student, who applied to work with a faculty member specializing in neural science,  wants to explore how to make dead men speak!  

Connected and safe!

I have not been able to blog in the last few days.  This is not because of lack of time or lack of issues to blog about [1].  Mainly, it is because by the time I am done with my academic and administrative work nowadays, it is very late.  A few days ago, I had a scary experience while returning home at night - I encountered two snakes and a (possibly) drunk biker who kept tailgating me.  Since then, I have been very particular about returning home on time.

Given the very remote location of my house, internet at home was out of the question before!  However, thanks to the efforts and initiative of some of my colleagues who take care of the networking needs of the institute, those of us who live on campus now have access to the institute network at home.

Apart from the many benefits of having internet at home, I can now blog more frequently, in the safe environs of home.  I hope I can be more blog-productive now.



[1] For readers at N1,  ;-) 

Solicited advice

A former summer student has written to me seeking advice with respect to the situation described below.  Since many readers of this blog are engineers pursuing research, I would truly appreciate some feedback on this matter:

I was recently offered an internship in Country X. It is sponsored by the Indian Government and only very few students have been selected from all over the country. I am in a great predicament. I realise that this a wonderful opportunity but feel that the quality of research is much better in India. I have decided to do an MS after my B.Tech. So I want to do a good internship which can help in getting an admit to a good university [1].

I am speaking to people and trying to get their opinion on the same. I am confident of getting a good internship in India (results aren't yet out). I am unaware of how much foreign exposure will matter in getting admission to a good MS programme. The university where I have been offered the internship isn't very well known. I have always wanted to do an internship in the area in which I am planning to pursue my higher studies. I am definitely not going to take up the topic in which I have been offered this internship for my higher studies. I mainly want to know the criteria on which I should be selecting an internship and things that will matter in getting an admission offer from a university.






[1]: She is probably referring to universities in USA.

Feeling the pulse - II

In a previous post, I started writing about my attempts to "feel the pulse" of N1.  In the last couple of months, N1 seems to be making the transition from a small school where everyone knows each other and a lot of things work informally to one where a system is evolving for all academic activities and administrative procedures.

In my previous post, I had expressed some concern that as the system becomes more formal, our senior administrative functionaries (both academic and non-academic) may not be as approachable anymore.  I now realize that my fear was unfounded.  Once a proper system is in place, the approachability of the seniors does not diminish- what diminishes is the need to approach the senior administration for every small thing.

Let me give you a very amusing example.  A few days after I joined N1, our department invited a senior professor for delivering a seminar talk.  The professor requested for transport arrangements between his residence and N1.  When I requested our transport in charge for arranging a vehicle, he told me that in principle, the honorarium to our speakers includes their transportation expenses.  If I want transport arranged for any speaker from the institute's side, I should take permission from the director.  I was very surprised and it took me a lot of courage to write to the director for such a trivial matter.  The director sent a one word email saying "approved", but I realized later that the transport IC could have definitely arranged this (without my writing to the head of the institute).  But, unlike his predecessors at this job, he was unwilling to take any action on his own in the absence of any written framework.  So, he cleverly deflected the job to another new and clueless person (me) who also did not know what was the right thing to do.

Soon after this, a form and instructions for requesting transport were uploaded on our intranet page.  If we need vehicles for any speaker/visitor, we simply fill up this form and submit it to the transport section, which then takes care of getting the necessary approvals etc.

Evolution of a proper system does not necessarily mean longer procedures and more hierarchy.  It simply means that every individual in the system is aware of his or her role in getting any job done, clearly understands how the job is to be done and that everything does not land up on the table of the director!! A proper system means that if you submit a requisition for something, the office assistant knows precisely what to do with it (or can readily refer to a handbook if unaware of the procedure) and will not toss back the requisition saying "I cannot do anything unless you get it approved from the authorities."
Such a system balances the job allocation among all members of the institute and also makes everyone accountable.

However, it also means that some requests cannot be entertained overnight.  Every so often, there is a clash between those who want something immediately and those who have to ensure that the request/suggestion is forwarded through the right channels.  Very frequently, there are also differences of opinions between those who like to have every little thing put down on paper and those who would instead like to move forward with the essentials.  This occasionally leads to frayed tempers during committee meetings or even informal discussions between people.

But, it is great if people debate and discuss these issues with an open mind and not overkill the issue by making it a "bureaucracy versus academic freedom" fight.