In appreciation of students

The very first batch of students of the flagship program at N1 is ready to graduate.  We have just received details about their future plans. About 80% of the students have chosen to pursue PhD in various disciplines.  The remaining 20% are either starting jobs in the industry or are joining well known management institutes in the country.  Among the PhD aspirants, there is approximately a 60:40 divide between those going abroad and those staying back in India.  The abroad-bound are mostly headed to Europe (primarily England, Germany and Switzerland), with a small portion going to North America.

Since I joined only last year and was away for about 5 months, I have not had much interaction with this particular batch.  But, I am very, very proud of them.  Many students in this batch joined this basic sciences program at N1 despite stiff parental opposition and peer pressure in a culture which still places supreme importance to engineering and medicine.  (Being involved in student affairs, I once met the mother of a student here who has been on anti depressants ever since her daughter joined N1 because her bright child will not become an engineer).  Being the first batch, these students have also survived the initial infrastructural rough patch at the institute.  On top of it all, they also did not have any precedent about future career choices.  They had reasons enough to complain.  Yet, not only have they performed well and carved their future paths, many of them have written to faculty members thanking them and saying that joining N1 has been a great experience for them!  

Here's wishing them all the very best! 

Meeting the students

An important task for me this summer is to mentor the eight summer students working with me.  We met last week and planned out activities for the next two months.

The first meeting with the summer students was very interesting.  Out of them 6 are in their second or third year of undergraduate program, while 2 are Master's students.  Depending on their previous course work and interests, I have divided them into four working groups studying four topics.  Our plan is to have biweekly seminars, which all the students are expected to attend.  In the first seminar, I will give a talk on one of the four topics, and in the second meeting in the same week, one student from the working group doing this topic will give another talk on it.  The intention behind getting students to talk is to ensure that they are working regularly and understand the concepts well enough to explain them to an audience.  Since the audience only has me and the other students, they will also not feel intimidated.  Also, although each group is expected to focus on its own topic, this seminar will ensure that they also get a broad understanding of what the other groups are doing. Students will also be working on certain assignments and experiments every week.  

The whole point of the summer program is that the students should learn to work on their own outside a typical classroom atmosphere.  Thus, it does not make sense for me to give standard three-times-a-week lectures.  It is much better that the students work on their own and approach me during my office hours, which have been generously scheduled.  On the other hand, there should be some kind of structure in the program so that I can ensure that the students are working and sufficiently involved. Hence, the biweekly seminars.  

I guess I am essentially designing the program on the lines of VSRP at the Tata Institute, with the modification that students will also give talks and that they are younger than VSRP participants.

The whole plan seems to work fine at the moment.  The students are regularly meeting me during office hours and are taking a lot of interest in their topics.  I am waiting to see how they do their assignments (or if they do them at all) and how they plan their talks.

I am also hoping that the regular seminars will inject some life into our currently very sleepy department as many of the faculty are traveling this summer.  

Non-program interaction with these students has been a lot of fun.  One of these students seriously believes that he is the next Messiah who will revolutionize the way science is taught in the country.  It is great to have dreams and ambitions and I applaud his noble intentions. However, I hope that he will learn in the next two months that one has to know a bit of science before bringing about a science revolution.

Yet another student was hoping to work on a project which is sort of my STEM field's equivalent of splitting the atom! Once again, I do not wish to discourage him. But, he is certainly not working on that here with me.

The other six students have not displayed any abnormal characteristics yet. There is one female student (FS) in this group and the above mentioned two students are trying to "mentor" her (without being invited, of course).  The other day, these two walked into my office to tell me how the reading material prescribed for FS is not appropriate.  I was secretly amused at their "concern", but firmly told them to focus on their own work.  I later thought of some measures to make sure that FS doesn't get stifled under their "care", but it seems that she herself is doing a good job in warding them off.

In conclusion, the summer program is holding up well for now.

Return of the N1ative

This post is slightly belated. Ideally, it should have appeared by the end of last week, but initial ground work and administrative work after rejoining has kept me on my toes. 

I am glad to be back at N1.  

Some of my hopes expressed in a previous post have fructified and some have not. 

Our new campus has made progress, but not as much as I imagined.  At the moment, some extra buildings near the old campus have been acquired for our incoming students this year. 

Things that I am very excited about: 

I have met and chalked out plans with my new PhD student and the summer students (more about this coming soon!).  

The library has got all the books that I had ordered before leaving.  

Three new faculty members are joining my understaffed department very soon and are bringing in research specialities that we very much need.  Some more interesting candidates will be interviewing soon.  

More faculty members are choosing to live inside the campus and are taking nice initiatives to improve life around here.

Non-academically speaking, it is mango season and as per my hopes, I get to eat fresh mangoes everyday from a tree right behind my house. 

All my other food desires, like fresh chapatis and summer veggies from a local farm have been fulfilled too. I have now happily resumed the policy of "eat local, think global".

Things that I am not so excited about: One of my favorite colleagues and my former office mate quit rather unexpectedly while I was away.  I now have a new office mate, who is a very nice person, but no substitute for my previous one.  

My hopes of drinking tea in Kulhar are dashed as the tea shop owner, in a modernization drive, has switched to regular cups, which seem to say, "Coffee, Tea: Love the new me."  

Sigh! everything in life is impermanent and subject to change, sometimes without notice!  

Finally, one of my neighbors, after meeting me remarked that I have become "healthy".  In India, this is a polite way of saying "Hey fatty, lose some weight".  My scales confirm her comment.  Sigh again :( 

Choosing summer students

I am now back in India, still sick and under strong medication, which along with the jet lag and extreme heat ensures that I sleep through most of the day.  I will be heading to N1 city tomorrow morning.

One of my important priorities for the coming two months is to supervise summer students. I am doing this for the first time.
Summer students at N1 come in through two main channels: the Indian Academy of Sciences- Summer Research Fellowship Programme and a fellowship programme run by N1 independently.  The objective of both programmes is to give an opportunity to students from all over India, especially teaching-specific universities, to work with scientists at research-based places and get some exposure to scientific research (something that may not be available to them at their universities).  Students from IIX institutes also apply to these programmes because their course work requires them to undertake projects during summer outside their institutes.

Students from the former channel apply directly to the Academy, indicating who they want to work with.  The proposed summer supervisor has no say in the selection process, but has the freedom to turn down a selected applicant upon being informed by the academy.  Two first year undergraduate students undergraduate will be working with me under this category.

Students coming in through N1's fellowship programme write directly to the faculty member with whom they want to work.  I received several such applications this year.  Instead of waiting till the last date of receiving applications and then deciding, I kept responding to the applications as and when they arrived.
I obviously did not expect undergrad students to write long research proposals. I just expected them to tell me about their previous coursework and what topics interest them.  I also expected them to know a little about what I do before applying to me.  As it turned out, even this was a lot to expect.
I received several applications addressing me as "sir" (In India, it is uncommon for students to address faculty members by their first names or even as Dr/Prof Last Name. Sir or madam is the most common form of address.)  I also received many applications in which the applicant expressed an interest in working in a subfield of my STEM field which is currently very hot and fashionable.  My own research area is very different from this research area.  Anyone who visits my webpage can easily figure this out and also that I am not a "sir"!  It was clear that the applicant was sending the same application everywhere and did not even bother to find out who the application was going to.
These applications were obviously rejected.  If this student had prepared a good application in other respects (like a good CV indicating their previous academic performance and preparation), I wrote back to them mentioning that their "research interests" do not coincide with mine.  Otherwise, I did not reply to these emails.
The applications that had me hopping mad looked something like this:

Dear sir,
I wish to pursue higher studies abroad.  Please accept me as a summer student.  Writing a paper with you  with facilitate my application abroad.
Yours,
Clueless Undergrad

While I have nothing against students wanting to go abroad, I don't like students who state this as their main aim in working with me rather than gaining knowledge.  I also do not like students who demand that I write papers with them!  Depending on my mood and available time, I wrote back to some of these students indicating how their application is incomplete and inappropriate.

I did get a few genuine and honestly written applications and in a burst of enthusiasm, I accepted six of these.  
There will be a total of eight summer students working with me this summer.  Most of them are second and third year undergrads who wish to major in my STEM field, but have had little coursework in it so far.  They are expected to study the topic assigned to them, work on problem sets, conduct experiments and submit a write up at the end of two months.
I think I could have done with a fewer number of students. But, now that the decision has been taken, I must do my best to make their stay productive.
I look forward to meeting them in a couple of days.  My next post will be about my strategies for supervising all these students at the same time.
Right now, the antibiotics are kicking in and it's time to sleep (and I have miles to go AFTER I sleep.....)

Recuperating

I have been unwell since the last couple of weeks. I will fly back to India towards the end of this week and am trying to rest and recover before the long trip and rejoining N1. This is particularly hard in the midst of a hectic traveling schedule.
I will be back soon with a series of posts on supervising undergraduate students. Stay tuned!

Waiting to go home

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am now wrapping up a semester long visit  to North America. This has been a productive semester. I was glad to be able to talk to many people in my field. I was also glad to be able to focus completely on science and not deal with administrative work at N1.  
I am refreshed, rejuvenated and ready to go back home now.  My department has to take many important decisions in the coming weeks related to faculty hiring, supervising of grad students and course structure for our undergraduate and graduate programs.  I am all set to jump right into it.  While on my sabbatical, I had a chance to talk to some senior colleagues in North America, who have given me valuable advice about many of these matters. A few days ago, I was particularly fortunate to meet a British emeritus professor who started his career in the early sixties in one of the IITs.  He spent four years there before returning to England.  He generously shared his experiences with me.  Much of what he mentioned is very similar to the current situation in N1.  I felt very encouraged and inspired after talking to him.

While I was away, many important events have taken place at N1.  Many labs have moved into our new, permanent campus.  The students residence is also well underway and expected to be ready by the start of the next term.  This makes me very happy because when I joined last year, the new campus was not much more than a deserted piece of flat land.  I am very excited to see it quickly evolving into a proper institute campus!  

The other things that I am eagerly looking forward to are home-made freshly baked chapatis, drinking tea in a Kulhar at our institute's tea shop,  fresh milk and vegetables from local farms AND mangoes freshly plucked from  trees within our campus :)

Traveling unlimited

As a busy and productive sabbatical semester in North America draws to an end and I prepare to return to India, I am in a mood to relax and reminisce about my migrant life.

Traveling has been the most constant feature of my life.  As a child of a central government employee with a (very) transferable job and later as an academic, I lived in many different parts of India and later in North America.  

In particular, during my childhood years. I was never sure when and where I would be going next.  I have been to a dozen different high schools in the northern, western and north-eastern parts of India.  It was a very common situation for my father to arbitrarily return home some evening with a transfer order, usually to a town in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a school year.  It was awkward and difficult to adjust to a new school curriculum and teaching system in a different state and in the middle of the year, but my attentive and super-disciplined mother managed to pull me through. 

While it was great to live in various parts of the country (often called "tribal" areas by the city dwellers) with very different cultures and make new friends, it was equally painful to say goodbye to them abruptly and move on within a few months. In the internet-less era, I have burnt a lot of midnight oil (literally so because of electricity problems in these  remote towns) writing letters to friends in other remote towns which probably never reached them.  

I remember moving from a warm part of the country to the Himalayas in the chilly month of November and then moving back from the pleasant weather in the hills to a hot and scorching summer in the plains in the month of May.  Experience in dealing with sudden changes of climate was useful to me when I moved to a very cold place in the east coast of North America for grad school.

The first place where I stayed for five years at a stretch was my PhD university. Like many grad students, I grew very attached to PhD city and found it emotionally overwhelming to leave.  For a long time, I naively considered it home.  The attraction has weaned off over the years as almost all my friends there have also moved away, but I still feel excited at the prospect of visiting it again.

After that, I did postdocs in two more cities in North America.  By the time of my second postdoc, I got tired of all the traveling and instability and very much wanted to go to some place where I could live happily and permanently for the rest of my life.  I was almost ready to become a citizen of this country, when life threw up some pleasant surprises and I found myself in N1, back in India.  If all goes well, N1 might be the place where I will "live happily ever after", but who knows what the future holds?

Anyhow, within a few months of my stay at N1-city, I found myself ready to make another 5-month visit to North America.  Before returning to India, I plan to visit PhD city, postdoc 1 city and another city, where my postdoc 2 mentor now lives.   

Moving around was fun when I was a child and all the planning was done by my parents.  I just enjoyed life while my parents did all the hard work.  As a grad student/postdoc, I was in charge of my own moves** and it wasn't all that fun. The move back to India required strenuous planning, but was exciting nonetheless.  

Traveling after joining N1 has been the most fun because now I travel with the assurance that I have a secure, permanent abode to return to.  

** My North American friends helped me a lot with all my moves, something that I will always be grateful for.