The office story

The temporary campus of N1 has very limited office space and we all have to share offices.  As a postdoc, I had always dreamt vividly of the day when I would be an independent faculty member and have my own office.  My second dream still remains a dream, but the joy at the realization of the first dream far exceeds the disappointment about not realizing the second.

I share an office with a really nice and easy-going office mate[1], let's call him OM.
We have co-ordinated our activities in such a way that we do not drive each other up the wall.

Firstly, while I am a morning person, OM is a night bird.  Therefore, my most serious research-related work gets done in the morning before OM arrives or while he is away teaching.  Similarly, his research work gets done in the evening or at night after I leave.

The timing that overlaps is late morning and afternoon, when we do teaching related work and/or have office hours for our students.  I am a little sensitive to noise, but OM manages to hold discussions with his students in a not-too-loud voice, and mostly over his desk.  By contrast, I like to discuss things with my students on the blackboard.  Moreover, since I have spent long years teaching really big classes in North America, despite my best efforts, my voice does get a little loud at times!  Therefore, my style of teaching is more disruptive.  It is rather convenient that OM is not bothered by noise (or at least does not complain about it).  Our office hours for students also do not coincide and therefore we have managed not to suffocate ourselves by an inflow of too many students at the same time.  As it happens, our office does not receive good cell-phone signal.  If either of us receives or makes a call, he or she is forced to go out of the office.  So, there is no disturbance on this account.

We also have an unwritten understanding that whatever we say to each other about N1 does not go out of the office.  Therefore, we often share our concerns and frustrations about troublesome matters.  He is one of the very few people here with whom I can converse freely without worrying about the consequences.

To cut a long story short, if one cannot have one's own office, having an office mate like OM is decidedly the next best option[2,3].

Recently, our office-sharing fairy tale almost came to an end, when the powers in charge of office space decided to shift OM out of our office to make way for a new female colleague (NFC), who joined us this semester.  It was perceived by the well-meaning authorities that two women would be more comfortable in the same office than a man and a woman.  (Is this policy common in other institutes in India?)

OM accepted this new turn of affairs with a stoic silence.  I believe in the fundamental premise that any resources that N1 is providing to us right now should be considered a luxury and not a right.  So, I did not want to complain about this new arrangement[4].  But one day, at the conclusion of a very pleasant and successful meeting, I took some risk and approached the senior person responsible for office allocation and requested him to let OM continue in the office.  To my relief, he happily agreed and mentioned that he was only acting on the assumption that I would prefer to share an office with a female colleague.  I thanked him for his concern and assured him that the previous arrangement with OM worked well for both of us.  So, OM and I continue to be office mates.

There's a small twist to our story.

NFC has been allocated office space in a different building which is currently under renovation.  This building is not yet ready and while she waits for her real office to be ready, an extra desk and chair has been arranged for her in our office.  NFC went through a short-lived trauma of her dream of her own office not materializing, but has adjusted well to the status quo.  For now, we three seem to be doing very well with each other, although, we sure hope that the status quo does not last too long.








[1] He reminds me of the happy-go-lucky Dev Anand in this song in Nau Do Gyarah
[2] To me,  sharing a spacious office with windows is much better than having a cubicle to oneself.
[3] Of course, we do have some points of conflict.  While OM prefers to open windows and let in fresh air, I am more of an AC person! I also like to set the temperature at 26 C, which he finds too cold!
[4] I was also afraid of being branded a trouble maker.

Winter school - conclusion

Our winter school was very successful.  Dr Rock-Star, the primary speaker, was absolutely delighted to see a large number of enthusiastic students for his lectures.
The topic on which he was lecturing is a very important topic in my field, and the available literature on this subject follows a certain approach.  However, he chose to convey the subject matter using a very different approach, which is elegant and more easily comprehensible to students.  He had not previously communicated much to me about his lectures and I realized on the first day that the problem sets that had been previously prepared (following the traditional approach) for tutorials would not match his lectures.  So, every morning before his lectures, Dr R-S and I would sit together and prepare new problem sets.  I have to admit- he was the brain behind the problems while I mostly typed them out and solved them.  I think I enjoyed this part of the winter school the most.  This new approach to the topic has also generated some interesting research problems and has been a valuable addition to my research programme.
The tutors played a very important role in the whole school.  They have not had any previous experience in teaching and took on this responsibility with a very positive attitude.  The material presented in the lectures was also very new to them.  They would take the problem sets from me just after Dr R-S's lecture everyday, work on them during the lunch hour and tutor the students in the afternoon.  According to the feedback forms that we later received,  the students highly appreciated the effort put in by these tutors.  I wish them a successful academic career ahead!
Our participants, as I mentioned before, were a healthy mix of students from IIX institutes as well as colleges and universities.  From the feedback received from them, it seems that most IIX students saw this winter school as yet another opportunity to do something exciting in the winter vacation.  Many of them applied to it because they were encouraged by the faculty at their institutes who were aware of Dr R-S's contribution to this field.  On the other hand, most of our university student participants had not heard of Dr R-S before and their primary motivation in applying was simply to experience the scientific atmosphere at a research institute.  The students unanimously felt that they got much more out of the lectures than they had anticipated.  This is possibly because instead of just attending lectures, they worked out the material in the lectures by themselves in the tutorials.  Another interesting feedback we received was that university students found faculty at N1 much more friendly and easy-going than those at their universities.  They probably would have had the same impression at most IIX and research institutes.
Dr R-S's visit and the winter school has been a great boost to our baby department.
Many students from N1, who attended these lectures, have now decided to major in my STEM field.  Even those students who have not done so have benefited from these lectures and have now become regular visitors to our department seminar.
Dr R-S enjoyed the visit very much and will be visiting us again in the coming winter.
Last, but not the least, my colleague from the last post, has now overcome his health problems.  Although his primary research interests are different from mine or Dr R-S's, he attended the lectures and enjoyed them.  He is very excited about the positive impact of such visits to N1 by senior scientists and we are both planning more workshops/winter schools in the coming years with external funding.  I hope that more colleagues will catch on to the spirit and join our efforts to make our department at N1 active and vibrant.

Mission winter school

Before continuing with the winter school story from my last post, I quickly went over it.  The frequent use of the pronoun "I" instead of "we" irked me and possibly irked the other readers as well.  Let me clarify - I am not a megalomaniac.  Nor do I lack in team spirit.  There were three of us who initially planned the lecture series.
However, by the time the plan was put into motion, one of my colleagues was battling a serious health problem while the other colleague was dealing with some personal issues which significantly engaged the colleague's mind and energy.
Moreover, since Dr Rock Star has been my academic mentor, it meant a lot to me that his visit should be a success and that he should return with a good impression of N1.  So, I ended up planning the event myself (although with a lot of help from the admin staff).  Hence the use of "I" more than "we".
Nonetheless, I do acknowledge that I have a serious problem in asking for help.  I tend to take on more responsibilities than can be handled comfortably[1].  Recently, I made some serious mistakes because of this tendency to bite off more than I can chew and have learnt, since then, to ask my colleagues frankly for help and also to say no to something I am unable to do(though I must admit, I say it rather tactlessly and sometimes to the wrong people, but more about that later).
Coming back to the topic at hand, the whole event was shaping up very differently from what had been initially anticipated.  Ideally, workshops/instructional schools should be planned and announced at least 4 to 5 months before the event so that by the time the participants are invited, they have enough time to book their tickets.
However, in this case, the announcement was sent out only about two months before and it was exactly a month before the event week that the "selected" participant list was ready [2].  At this time, a tragedy occurred - due to an unexpected server problem, some of us lost all the emails in our N1 email account.
I was among these unfortunate few [3].  Not being a very computer savvy person, I had not created a back-up and therefore, lost all the contact information of the selected participants [4](their email addresses had been clubbed together in my address book, which I also lost).  However, since I was "personally invested" in this mission and 25 is not such a big number, I remembered the names of all the participants and which institutes/universities they were from.  It was easy to retrieve the email addresses of students coming from research and IIX institutes.  Not so for university students.  Fortunately, I remembered the writers of their reference letters and it was easy to contact them and ask them to send me the email addresses of these students.  So, this crisis was somehow averted and important lessons were learnt regarding data management as falling back on memory is not always a viable option.
All invited students, except one, confirmed their attendance.  Around this time, I announced Dr R-S's visit to students at N1 again and about 25 students expressed an interest in attending these lectures.  So, we now had a nice audience of about 50 students ready for the lectures, with four of them being PhD students, willing and able to run tutorials.  So, it seemed more appropriate (and also more fashionable) to call this a winter school.  The budget was approved, all required rooms in guest house and hostels were reserved, the registration packages for participants were ready and a bus was arranged to bring students from the train station at scheduled hours.  A big lecture hall was also booked.
Around a week before the arrival of the speaker, I started receiving emails from more students at N1, who wanted to attend the winter school.  Since the lecture hall can accommodate a very big number of students, there was no problem in them attending the lectures.  However, it was too late to register them for the winter school and therefore, we could not give them the registration package (which included meal coupons).
In the 48 hours preceding the first day of our winter school, a few strange and unexpected things happened.  An undergraduate student from an IIX institute, who had not applied before, wrote to me out of the blue that he would be attending the event and that he had already booked his train tickets for N1 city.  I was highly irritated, but could not do much because by the time I received the email, he would have already boarded the train to N1 city.  I did not have the heart to refuse him hostel accommodation on his arrival, but I did have a talk with him about winter school application etiquette.   I would like to hear back from readers what they would have done in such a situation.
I also got a panic call from four female students coming from a college in Delhi.
These students had made their booking together through a travel agent, who booked their train for a wrong date.  They realized this only on reaching the station and by then, it was too late for them to book another train.  So, they had no option available except to come by flight the next morning.  This was not such a big problem for me - the shuttle bus driver was instructed not to wait for them at the train station and pick up arrangements were made from the airport.  However, on the day of their flight, they called up again to inform me that this flight had got canceled and that the only flight available was a late night flight.  Due to a shortage of institute vehicles, at such short notice, I had no option but to hire a vehicle(Tata Sumo) from a private operator known to me. The father of one of the women spoke to me and said that he had apprehensions about the girls arriving at N1 city at such a late hour and being received by a private taxi driver.  I sympathized with his concerns, but was at my wits end.  At that time, I remembered that most students at N1 are usually up till very late at night.  I called up two second year students, who had volunteered to help me with organizing the event, and asked them if they could accompany the Sumo driver and receive the girls.  These two boys, of course, jumped at the opportunity.  The father was now sufficiently reassured.  Needless to say, the girls arrived very late, but safely and comfortably at N1.
All students had now arrived on campus and we were ready to begin.
Okay, so the post has again turned out to be much bigger than I thought.  What's more, I am visiting my family this weekend and my disciplinarian father is mortified that I am blogging so late at night.  I will continue the story in my next post.





[1] As a child, I once asked my teacher to make me a class "monitor".  But, once she did so, I found myself unable to do even simple things like opening a Godrej almirah, in which we stored our books etc. 
[2] Some students, who could have really benefited from these lectures, applied after the deadline.  Sadly, I was unable to invite these students because we had already reached the numbers approved by the administration.
[3] All our lost data was indeed retrieved later, but by then the winter school was over.
[4] I had put together all their email addresses in my address book the previous evening, with the intention to send out the invitation the following morning. The server problem happened overnight.  In my (misplaced and ill-timed) effort to save paper, I also did not print out the applications of students, but kept track of them online. 

How an informal lecture series became a winter school

Happy independence day to all Indian readers!
Today, I would like to write about an activity at N1 last year that I thoroughly enjoyed organizing.
After I joined, some colleagues and I felt that it would be a good idea to invite a distinguished scientist in our field to visit us for a week in the winter and deliver some lectures that would be accessible to students.  This was a vague idea, but no one had any concrete suggestions.  Apart from the above qualities, we needed a speaker who would be willing to spend a week at a new institute like N1 at a time when almost all institutes in India organize their conferences/workshops etc.
One of my academic mentors, let's call him Dr Rock Star, maintains very close ties with India and frequently visits different research institutes here.  He has done some really good work in my field and also happens to be an excellent teacher.  He was one of the people who offered me a lot of encouragement when I decided to join N1 and had even expressed a willingness to visit me some time.  So, he seemed to to be the "ideal" candidate for our mini- lecture series.  Our director immediately approved the lecture series.  I wrote to Dr Rock Star, who happily accepted our invitation.  However, as his schedule is usually very packed, we did not have a lot of flexibility in coming up with dates.  He simply gave us a block of five days in which he was not scheduled for any other event and we had to plan our lecture series within those days.
The immediate challenge was that the last three of those five days were coinciding with an international conference at N1 that had been planned months in advance.  I also came to know that there was another symposium coinciding with the first two days of our proposed lecture series.  This symposium had been announced before I joined N1 and I was not made aware of it until after Dr Rock Star confirmed his dates.  Given the space and resource constraints at N1, I found myself in an uncomfortable situation.  I felt that I was trying to bull-doze my way through events which had been carefully planned months in advance.
Fortunately, the organizers of both the conference as well as the symposium had no such qualms and fully co-operated with me. We sat together and figured out the room allocations for all visitors of the three events and luckily, our guest house had just the right number of rooms available to house all faculty participants of the three events as per their dates.
The second challenge (or so I thought) was to get student participants for our lecture series.  At first, my plan was to have the lectures only for students at N1.
Sadly, students from my own department were very few in number and did not show much enthusiasm for Dr Rock Star's lectures.  I was scared that he might just end up lecturing to empty class rooms!
I remember bringing up this issue during a departmental meeting, in which the director was also present. I asked him if I could invite about 20 students from outside N1 to attend the event.  He approved this suggestion along with the reimbursement of travel expenses of out-station participants and asked me to get in touch with the accounts section to work out the detailed budget.
That evening, I sent out emails to my colleagues at other institutes in India, announcing Dr R-S's visit and lectures and requested them to forward this information to students from their institutes and universities in their cities/towns who would be interested in these lectures.  I thought that within a few weeks, I might hear from around 20 students who would like to attend these lectures.  I was in for a big surprise! By the next afternoon, I had received about a hundred emails from interested students.  To my amusement, some of the emails were from lecturers in certain colleges who wanted to bring their whole class along for these lectures.[1]
Over the week, I received many more applications.  It was clear that I would have to follow some sort of selection procedure to short-list  genuine participants.   So, I wrote back to all these students asking them to submit, by a certain date, a statement of interest explaining why they were interested in these lectures along with a reference letter from someone who could comment on their academic performance.  This automatically narrowed down the applicant pool.
Apparently, college lecturers who previously wanted to bring their whole class with them did not show any willingness in guiding their students on how to write a statement!
By the deadline, I received about 30 "complete" applications from students from various universities and IIX institutes.  These were mostly undergraduate students, but some of them were in Master's programs.  Some of these applications had to be rejected because these students, applying from the same department, had just cut-copy-pasted the same statement!  Other than these, I invited all other students.
They were about 25 in number, including 4 PhD students.
Meanwhile, I announced Dr R-S's visit again to our students at N1.  This time around, I received a much more positive response.  25 students expressed interest in attending these lectures.  Apparently, when I had sent the previous announcement, many of them had not received it due to a server problem and hence the poor response!
So, there would be 50 student participants attending these lectures.  It was much more appropriate to call it a winter school now.  The 4 PhD students were asked if they would be willing to run tutorial sessions after lectures on each day of the school- they agreed.
At around this time, I went to the accounts office.  After all the horror stories I had heard about accounts sections in government institutes, I was very nervous about dealing with them.  But, they turned out to be  very helpful and friendly.  I had no experience in preparing any kind of budget before and had no idea how to contact caterers, transport providers etc- the accounts office did all this work.  They also pointed out how much expense one would incur on many other contingencies that I had not thought about. [2] One evening, after some discussion, around 5 pm,  our budget was ready. We sent it to the director and by 6 pm, we got a one-word reply from him, "approved".

This has turned out to be a much larger post than I imagined (just like the winter school).  In my next post, I will write about my experience in running the winter school, which is when the real challenges showed up.



[1] The other amusing outcome was that Dr Rock Star started receiving invitations from several colleges in India, from which he had never heard before, inviting him to visit them during his forthcoming visit to India!
[2] I sometimes feel that it is probably much harder for accounts people to deal with faculty members than for us to deal with them.  If they are not dealing with people like me who dare to organize big events without knowing the basics of writing up a budget, they are dealing with others who try to teach them how to do their jobs! Abi@nanopolitan, in this post has a link to a really nice picture about how people in science see each other.  One could easily replace the technician with the accounts section staff. 

Welcome new readers

Last week was very eventful for this blog.  Thanks to a very kind post by Abi@Nanopolitan, this blog got an exponential increase in readership and lots of new followers.  In fact, to be very honest, before Abi's post, I would be lucky if I got more than 10 readers a day!  As per the blog stats, now I seem to be getting a few hundred readers a day!  I am of course delighted that people are reading the blog.
So, welcome to all my new readers :-)
Many of you have also left very interesting comments and questions.
First of all, thank you for the encouraging feedback.  I am really happy that people want to read all that I write about.
Secondly, blogger seems to relegate a lot of comments to spam, which I have to correct from time to time.  That's why some of the comments appear later.
Some readers have asked me why I remain anonymous.  Some have also pointed out that it is not easy to pull off anonymity for too long in our small scientific community in India and that it is easy to figure out my identity from the hints I leave on the blog.  I agree with them.
I have absolutely no malicious intentions in remaining anonymous.  Nor do I have much to lose if my identity is discovered.  What I write here is what I openly say to my colleagues at N1.  But, at the same time, I don't see any strong and pressing reason to reveal my identity because I don't think it will make any qualitative difference to the blog.
Some readers have also written that reading the blog has helped to allay their misapprehensions about applying to new institutes.  I am delighted to hear this.  I strongly believe that an academic job seeker should explore all job opportunities with an open mind and zero prejudice.
There has also been some discussion about the contentious issue of a candidate being asked about his or her marital status during job visits.  In the North American context, it is now illegal to ask such questions during interviews.  No member of the selection committee will openly say to a candidate that being unmarried will work in his or her favour because as per the "written" law, the decision to hire a candidate is to be made solely on the basis of merit (it is not for me to comment how far this is practiced).
However, I have learnt in the last few months that conversations like this in India have to be evaluated in a different light.  People openly ask others about their personal lives and also share tidbits about their own.  Professor Giridhar's blog links to a very informative website for new faculty at IISc, which frankly advises them not to get offended at being asked such questions.
I have learnt to take myself a little less seriously and just ignore or laugh off these remarks.
I recently came to know that the prof at O2 who had asked me my marital status indeed really wanted me there and pushed my case.  Therefore, it is entirely possible that he was asking me about my personal life    with very harmless and noble intentions.  Perhaps, he really felt that he could use this information to push my case!  [I wonder what he would think if he knew that I harshly labeled him a sexist because of that!]  But I still feel that it would be best if these awkward conversations do not come up in professional settings and certainly not immediately before a candidate's job talk!!
Typical PhD student has raised an interesting question:
suppose you are an experimentalist, and require tens of various kinds of equipments (plus skilled people/technicians who can maintain those & fix problems in them) for your research. Suppose you join an institute in India, be old or new, and you are given grants to buy one big equipment for your research. Now, if you join an old institute, you have all the other kinds of equipments up & running in shape, with dedicated technicians, so that you can launch your research straight away. However, in a new institute, by the time one can procure the other kinds of equipments (worth a few million dollars in total, for example), set them up, and hire & train people to maintain them, one will have past his/her prime in research. So in this regard, could you please comment if it is not wise to join an institute with some good infra-structure ? It is certainly great to take up challenges in a new institute, and to challenge oneself in excelling things, but I was wondering if it would make more sense to join an already reputed & established institute.

The current facilities at N1 are sufficient for my experimental and computational requirements - so, I have not seriously considered this issue.   I would like to think about this question some more, talk to my colleagues who have much bigger lab requirements and address this question in a future post.  Meanwhile, feedback from readers about this question is most welcome.

Institute activities - 4 (More interaction with students)

I have been very busy for the last couple of weeks with the admission procedure at N1.  Last year, my only contribution to student admission was to proctor the entrance exams.  This year, in addition to that, my responsibilities included counseling students applying here, checking their documents and helping the first years with moving into and settling down on campus.  Till a month ago, I was a well meaning but scatter brained prof, who cared about students at N1, but did not have any hard facts about them!
Now, even if you wake me up at midnight, I will be able to rattle off data about the number of students in each program and each year, in which residence each student is staying, the academic performance of the older students and (!!) even the order in which our new students have registered.
I must admit that it is an absolute pleasure to interact with the fresh batch.  Since all these students have seen me throughout the whole admission procedure, many of them approach me freely with their questions and concerns.  N1 is in a position to offer them many facilities and resources that we could not offer to the students who joined before and I enjoy giving this good news to students and seeing their faces light up with joy.  On the other hand, we still cannot offer the facilities that students at old institutions take for granted.
One night, I showed up unannounced in one of the student hostels to check how the new occupants were doing.  I was mentally prepared to encounter unhappy, demanding students, staying away from home for the first time, who would complain about N1 not matching their expectations.  To my surprise, these students were mostly cheerful and excited.  They raised some concerns, which, fortunately, I was in a position to address quickly and to their satisfaction.  After that, we had a friendly chat about student life, science and course work.  I was surprised to hear first years asking me questions about where I did my PhD from, why I chose that particular university and how I prepared for GRE.  These were not the questions I had as a 17 year old staying away from home for the first time!
Nonetheless, there have been crazy moments as well.  The craziest days were the four days immediately after the registration.  My phone was continuously ringing for all kinds of reasons (some genuine, mostly silly).  Recently, I was in touch with a friend to whom I described one such evening of phone calls.  She was very amused- so, I thought I would share it on this blog:

5 pm - Call from a student who is lost in the campus and does not know how to get back to her hostel. I had to bike to her location and guide her back.
6 pm - Call from a student who is upset that her room is a few steps away from that of her classmates. She wants to be in the adjacent room!
6.30 pm - Call from a student who has been alloted Hostel  A which is next to a boys hostel. Her parents do not want her to live next to a boys hostel. [This girl is in Physics! I told her to convince her parents because she is going to be surrounded by men all her life! Eventually, they got convinced]
7.15 pm - call from the same student that her parents are convinced.
9 pm - call from a student who wants a vehicle the next morning to go to class!
11 pm - earlier in the evening, a student had discovered a lizard in her food.  Being a sensible person, instead of calling me, she called up the medical unit and was immediately taken to the hospital.  But, the nurse called to tell me about this.

The worst is over now.  Now that the classes have started, students are too busy struggling with their course work to call me! I too can now focus on my real jobs, research and teaching, which is what I thought I had signed up for!