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.
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.
2 comments:
Dear Dr. NPNI
Thank you for sharing this information. It comes life a fresh breath of air amidst the negative view of India
that surrounds most academics here in the USA.
Thanks again!
Himanshu
Love you NPNI !!
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