When students run the show

The last few weeks have seen a wonderful improvement in my relationship with students in the capacity of hostel warden.  I actually don't mind being a warden anymore, even though this year I will be responsible for a hostel with 120 students, both men and women.  I am happy to meet students when they come to my office or when they stop to talk to me in corridors.

This is due to various reasons.  Firstly, the institute now invites student representatives to certain committee meetings which involve their life on campus.
In these meetings, students are encouraged to speak up and share their viewpoint.
But, most importantly, by being part of the discussion, they become aware of the constraints under which the institute is functioning and why their demands cannot be immediately met.  They understand the working of institutional procedures and realize why certain things cannot be done overnight.  As a result of it all,  the warden is not seen as a bad cop any longer (at least, I hope that s/he is not!) [1]

Secondly, I now follow the policy of transparency with students in my hostel.
Whenever any complaint has to be forwarded to different sections, I cc the email to the student representative.  If they come to my office to ask why a certain decision has been taken, I tell them the reason instead of meaningless references to "instructions from the authority."

For example, last week, a section of PhD students, accosted me after a seminar to demand why they are not being alloted single rooms despite repeated promises made to them about it.  "We lose our HRA to live on campus, but are treated like undergraduate students.  Is this fair?"  I was a little annoyed at being questioned in this way.  At the moment, N1 does not offer hostel accommodation to its PhD students because of space constraints [2].  However, we try to provide hostel seats for them if space is left after accommodating our undergraduate students.  As this entails losing their HRA, very few students have opted for it and on this account, they naturally feel upset with the hostel wardens for not providing them single seater rooms.  I took the students to my office and showed them the data about incoming  students.  After that, I showed them our allotment charts and convinced them that single seater rooms are not possible unless we turn some rooms into cramped three-seaters.  As a result, the students understood the reason why we cannot meet their demands and we parted on a friendly note.

The delay in the construction of our permanent hostel complex (for reasons completely beyond our control, as the students now realize) also results in students moving between the available hostels every year (due to changes in numbers of men and women).  As warden, I have had to organize two such moves.  The move last year upset many of the women students because they had to move from a building close to the academic area to a building far away.  There was also some confusion because the security guards insisted on searching their baggage before they left a hostel and the vehicle helping them to move was too small (and in between the move, the driver suddenly went away for lunch, leaving the students stranded for a long time).  I was inundated with angry phone calls all through the day.  The students also had to face many problems in the first few days of their move to the new hostel.  For a long time, many of these students even refused to speak to me!

However, the same students happily cooperated with us in orchestrating another move.  Although the students had been warned about their impending move, due to some logistical reasons, we had to shift the dates a little.  As a result, this move happened while most students were away.  However, the student hostel representative got in touch with them, informed them about the move and explained to them the reason behind the shift in dates.

This time, the registrar's office was kind enough to provide me with the assistance of two office staff members who coordinated the move.  These assistant wardens first ensured that the hostel to which the students were moving was in a livable condition.  They got all the rooms thoroughly cleaned up and the electricity fitments inspected and repaired.  Many of the students were away on vacation, but had packed their items properly before leaving.  Under the supervision of the assistant wardens, the housekeeping staff properly labeled all the boxes and also packed the items which had been left unpacked by students.  We hired a truck, which transferred all the items in a couple of rides (and therefore, students did not have to wait for hours for the institute vehicle driver to return from his long lunch!)

The student representative was pro-active in coordinating the whole move along with the assistant wardens.  Incidentally, on the day of their move, I was traveling for a conference to a different city.  I only received two phone calls on that day - one to inform me that the move had begun and the other to inform me that it was over.  Both the AWs were highly appreciative of the student representative's presence of mind and involvement.

To conclude, I have learnt that the relation between faculty and students can immensely improve if students are kept informed about institute policies, treated like responsible adults and encouraged to take initiatives to solve their problems.  I have always admired students at N1 for staying happy in spite of the difficulties that they have seen here, but their involvement with the institute makes things even better.





[1] Last year, I heard, through "anonymous sources" in the hostel that many students were under the impression that I was against providing regular bus services to them between their hostel and academic buildings.  This is of course far from the truth.  I hope that this misinformation has been quelled due to the presence of our student representative in the transport committee.  After attending this meeting, she is aware of the limited vehicles at our disposal and how bus routing has to be optimized.


[2] These space constraints will vanish once our permanent hostel building will be ready in a few months.

Reproducing an edited version of an old post

I am visiting another N institute this week for a workshop.  It is simply amazing to be here.  The workshop has been beautifully organized and I am delighted to feel the positive vibes and enthusiasm of colleagues at this institute.  I am also very happy to meet many friends after more than a decade (and acquaintances who I knew only via email before).  I thought I would write a detailed post about it, but the workshop is very intense and we have been given "bed-time" reading.  So, I will simply post an edited version of something I had written about long ago, before Abi posted a link to this blog and made it familiar to Indian audience.

This post was about a particularly negative experience at N1 (which I removed once I recovered from that experience.)   There is no point in going into that story again, but here's the second half, about what I learnt.  Please note that this was written only a few months after starting my faculty position at N1, when I was learning to handle administrative tasks for the first time.  I was in tears that day, but I find it particularly funny as I read it now- so, thought I would share it :)  This part is being reproduced verbatim:

What I knew theoretically, but learnt practically from the ordeal:

1) Get ALL the facts absolutely correct before uttering them in a meeting.  There is no room for any mistake, even with respect to apparently irrelevant details.

2) If two super-important tasks are to be done at the same time, plan well and finish one before the other.  If this is not possible, speak frankly to your colleagues and ask for help.  It is better to express inability to do something than take it up and mess it up at a crucial time. 

3) Seniors all over the world get angry when mistakes are made by juniors.  In India, however, people express their anger/displeasure more openly.  In fact, this senior-junior thing is taken way more seriously in India than in the West. The sophisticated method of pointing out an errant colleague's mistake in person and behind closed doors is not always followed here.  Be prepared and don't take it personally.  The colleagues in front of whom you are taken to task have probably lived through it too.

4) When a colleague gets angry, keep quiet and wait for the tide to pass.  If you feel that he or she is making a mistake, wait for him or her to cool down before pointing this out. (I guess this is a common sense technique).

5) Resist the urge to pass on the baton and scream at innocent people later in the day.

Two in one

As I have mentioned before, compared to other departments at N1, my department is really short of faculty members.   In the last one year, we somehow managed a mostly one-to-one mapping between our courses and instructors per semester, with some of us teaching two courses [one course typically being a higher level course taught to students in upper years ].   However, in the new course structure, we will be teaching two extra courses per semester from next year.  We further wish to strengthen our Integrated Master's and PhD programme and add some more courses to it instead if asking these students to take courses with upper year undergraduates.

Combine this with the dwindling number of faculty members in our department and you have a situation in which we will all need to teach two courses per semester.
As I was describing this situation to a colleague from a very well-endowed department, he remarked, "two courses per semester? That's a fate I wouldn't wish for my enemies!"

I appreciate this colleague's concern for my department.  Most of my own departmental colleagues have also thought about it.  Given that most of us are very young and building up our research programmes, we would ideally like a teaching load of at most one course per semester, just like our friends in the other departments.  Nonetheless, we are mentally prepared for this scenario [0].

A colleague, who has been instrumental in designing our courses and has taught multiple courses per semester before, feels that it will not be as difficult as we have ourselves designed our course structure and content.  Contributing to a scheme which we feel strongly about will be challenging and will not feel like a burden.  I share my colleague's optimism, but am also aware of the challenges of multi-teaching.

In the previous semester, I taught two courses for the first time.   Both were taught to moderately sized groups.  I had very ambitious plans for both these courses.  I wanted to upload typed course notes for both of them because typing things out makes the structure and material very clear in my mind.  The plan was to prepare all lectures for course 1 in the coming week on Saturday, lectures for course 2 on Sunday and spend about one and a half hours each daily typing up the notes during the weekdays.  This, as I foresaw, would also give me ample time for research.

As it turned out, however, I found preparing the lectures much more challenging and time consuming than I had thought.  It would take me the entire weekend to prepare the lectures of one course (the course which I had thought would be easier to teach!)  I would prepare the lectures for course 2 during the weekdays and this also took a lot of time.  So, I toned down my ambitious plans and was able to put up typed notes only for one course till the middle of the semester.  After that, as the pace of the lectures increased, the time spent in preparing them increased even more and I had to give up typing notes for good.  I also found myself not able to give as much time to my PhD and Master's student as I would have liked.

Perhaps, teaching both these courses could have been less strenuous if I had taught at least one of them before.  With more experience, pursuing this kind of teaching load without impacting research work can also possibly become "second" nature.  But, as of now, it certainly is a challenge and entails very strict time management.

In the coming semester, I will be teaching two courses.  I have already taught one of them before and have the course notes ready [1].  So, this semester will be an opportunity to upgrade the material and the presentation [2].  The second course will be taken by a Master's student and Integrated PhD student doing projects with me and I have already planned for it according to their requirement.  As an additional advantage, this will add to the time I can devote to them.  If one has to teach two courses in one semester, this is the optimal course allotment one can hope for and we would want to ensure a similar arrangement for all department instructors as much as possible.

In my field, teaching two courses per semester is very common in similar Indian institutes as well as in North American universities.  Postdocs and PhD students might have it easier with just one course per semester, but permanent faculty, in a large number of research universities, have a 2:1 or 2:2 course load.  Faculty members at places with a 1:1 load consider themselves lucky to have a light load.

Here, however, almost all my colleagues have graduated from institutes where 1:0 load is more of a norm (if not 0:0!)  Most had not taught before joining N1.  So, a 2:2 or 2:1 load seems daunting because one is simply not habituated to it.

I look forward to hearing from readers about their current teaching loads, their thoughts about it and the load they would ideally like to have.


[0] I am writing this post under the assumption that there are two teaching semesters - autumn and spring.  The summer months are non-teaching months.  Some senior professors at the institute have floated the idea of offering "soft" courses in the summer semester, but at the moment, I don't want to go in there!


[1] I was supposed to teach a first year course before, but recent changes in the course structure and our departmental composition have necessitated  the outsourcing of this course to a colleague from another department.


[2] Teaching the same course over and over again can become boring and uninspiring.