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."
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."
1 comment:
This is an excellent post. Thanks for summarizing Professor K VijayRaghavan comments and bringing him to our attention. His views on why we end up doing too much service are very insightful.
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