Are you a student?

I often get mistaken for a student.  Almost always, it leads to hilarious situations.

When I was interviewed at N1, some people asked a colleague who was showing me around if I was her student.  The guest house in charge was very concerned at my being the only person staying in the guest house at that time and told my colleague, "She is very young. She might get scared."

When I joined N1, many people assumed that my father is a new faculty member and I am just following him.  When he accompanied me to some offices, the office assistants passed the forms to him and started explaining to him how to fill them up! (therefore, I have requested him not to accompany me when I join New1, and even when he does visit me there, he will be asked to stay away from the office premises.)

When I was asked to become warden of the girls hostel, some students asked my domestic help (who also works at the institute) about me.  She apparently replied, "Woh toh khud bachchi hai, aur ladkiyon ko kya sambhalegi!" [Translation: She herself is a girl. How will she take care of other girls?]  By the way, it did not take the students, guards and house keeping staff long to figure out that I was not a "bachchi"!

Every once in a while, students come into my office and ask me when Dr NPNI will be back! [1]   Every year, I meet a couple of new students  who start off by calling me "didi."

However,  the frequency of such incidents has decreased, especially since I drastically upgraded my wardrobe.

Recently, another such situation presented itself.  While attending a conference last week, I was having dinner with a senior colleague, when a young PhD student joined us.  The senior colleague introduced us to each other by our names.
Student asked me where I am from and on hearing my answer, asked me what research area I work in.  After that, he continued the conversation with senior colleague.

A couple of days later, this student walked into an office in which I was using a desk reserved for visitors.  I was preparing some lectures for my course.  He had come to talk to a faculty colleague at New1 who sits in that office.  Here's how the conversation went:

Student (to me): Hi! What's up? How come you are here?

New1 Colleague: She is using every spare minute to prepare her course lectures.

Student(to me, looking surprised): Oh, are you faculty? I did not know that.

New1 Colleague: Yes.  She is currently a faculty member at N1 and is joining us next semester.

Student: Cool. I had no idea.

NPNI: (Smiles, and thinks "I thought as much!")

Later, in the course of his conversation with New1 Colleague, I heard this student asking very demanding questions like, "How come this work had not been done before? What was your motivation in working on it?"  I rolled my eyes and thought "Poor kid! He will grow up soon enough!"[2]


Next morning, as I flew back to N1 city with a colleague from another place, I narrated this incident to her and asked if she knew whose student this person was.
My colleague laughed back, "He is not a student.  He is a faculty member at -----Institute!"



[1] One student even asked me, "Are you Dr NPNI's secretary?"  I was almost flattered that he thought I was important enough to have a secretary.
[2] Haven't we all said stupid things to profs when we were students? 

An upcoming move

I am very happy to share with you the news that I have recently been offered and have accepted a position at another "N" institute, and will be moving next semester.
Inspired by a comment left by an anonymous commenter long ago, my future institute will be henceforth referred to as New1[1].  My primary motivation to move to New1 is the tremendous opportunity that it provides for my academic growth.

Working at N1 has been a wonderful experience and I have always been very happy here.  But, I have had to take this difficult decision purely from the point of view of furthering my academic goals.  N1 and New1 share very similar philosophies and objectives and that is an added advantage.

I am feeling a lot of things right now. I feel excited about a new opportunity and I also feel sad at the prospect of moving away from some very close friends and dear colleagues. [This has been my plight since childhood - move from a place as soon as I begin to build personal connections there- sigh!  In the last six months at N1, I have made some really good friends here!]

But, what I feel the most right now is gratitude. I am grateful to New1 for expressing an interest in my application and processing it in a very timely manner, grateful to N1 for understanding my professional needs and granting the necessary approvals [2] very smoothly, grateful to all my referees for sending in their letters at very short notice and for always supporting me in all my endeavours.  My initial plan was to apply a few months later and to more than one place so that I could give my referees sufficient time to write.  However, once my former advisor and second postdoc mentor assured me that they will write for me as soon as needed, I decided to avail this very good opportunity presented by New1.  After this, I contacted two other referees who also promptly sent in their letters.

I am also very grateful for the professional courtesy and the positive vibes that I encountered  during my interaction with the chairperson, members of the selection committee and other faculty members during the visit to New1 for my job talk and interview.

Coincidentally, this week, I am at New1 for a conference.  I have met many future colleagues and they have been very friendly, warm and welcoming, this making me look forward to the move.

Finally, I am so grateful to be in India at a time when there are so many opportunities to build a science career at new places which want you and also the opportunity to contribute towards building these places.






[1] The other possible names could be N2, NN1 etc. But, I like New1 the most.
[2] Applications to move from one government institute in India to another have to go through proper channels.  Thus, I had to take approval from the director at N1 to apply to New1.  I truly appreciate his cooperation in this matter. 

On guest houses

Earlier this week, I visited another institute and stayed at their guest house for a couple of days.  This GH had a very homely atmosphere.  I had one room of a big apartment with shared kitchen and dining facilities.  All the meals were cooked and served fresh by a resident caretaker (who reminded me of the proverbial Bansi kaka from Hindi movies).  It was sheer delight to have hot and puffed chapatis fresh off the pan for dinner (something that I don't enjoy at home also as my cook does the cooking and leaves before I return).  We were served hot Indian meals for breakfast as opposed to toast or cereal with milk.  The caretaker was also kind enough to serve us masala chai before we left in the morning and after we returned in the evening. Had I not been otherwise preoccupied, I might have stepped into the kitchen and taken some cooking lessons from him.

This visit brought back some pleasant memories of my fist visit to N1.

Every year, N1 goes through a rough time accommodating its new batch of students.  However, hosting visitors is not one of our problems.  Our authorities have been very conscious about maintaining a couple of small but decent guest houses so that we can invite and host visiting scientists without any constraints [1].
A very talented person from the hospitality industry was brought in to renovate some old, decrepit houses into functional guest houses.  Two of these guest houses, known as VIP guest houses, host senior and distinguished scientists and also new faculty members who stay there till they find a place of their own.  The only limitation is that these guest houses do not have a fully functional kitchen.  The visitors either eat at the hostel canteens or food is brought from outside and heated in a microwave before it is served.

There is another guest house, which hosts job candidates and faculty members who stay back on campus to teach early morning classes.  I stayed in this guest house during my first visit.  This guest house also did not have its own kitchen, but was located right next to the director's bungalow.  As the director stayed by himself in his bungalow,  he allowed some other rooms in a different part of the bungalow to be used for hosting guests.  The dining area of this house was also made accessible to institute visitors.  Thus it happened that during my four day visit to N1, I ended up having fresh, home-cooked meals prepared by the director's chef along with other visitors [and many a times, the director himself joined us].  

Due to a variety of reasons, this bungalow is not open to visitors any more.  Thus, institute guests are back to having packed meals in their rooms.

I was very impressed that the institute that I was visiting has made such comfortable long-term arrangements for their guests.  It's always nice to feel at home when traveling.

[1] However, earlier this month, it looked like we might have to convert our guest houses into hostels.  Fortunately, we were able to avoid this extreme step.

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.

Intelligent course designing

Recently, there has been much introspection at N1 about its undergraduate programme.  The first two batches of our undergraduate programme have done very well and most have got into prestigious PhD programmes all over the world.
While there is much appreciation of this fact, it is also felt that in the current course structure, the performance of students in the first two years has not been up to the mark.

Naturally, some are questioning whether our current process of admitting students, in the quest to fill up the number of seats specified by MHRD, is compromising on the quality of students.  This question assumes special importance in the current national debate concerning the IIT entrance exams.

The other question that people are asking is whether the current course structure of our undergraduate programme is the best structure to provide a strong foundation to our students in the sciences?  Is this system optimal from the point of view of the students? Has this system been fair to the students that we do get? Can we make our programme more accessible to our students without diluting our courses and without compromising on the objectives of our institute?

In the current system, students take a broad variety of courses in the sciences in the first two years  and choose a major subject in the third year (though they also continue to study interdisciplinary courses).  Thus, in the first two years, the students have to learn enough about different sciences to be able to develop a broad perspective in science and make an informed choice of their major.  The primary challenges in this system are

a) the jump from class twelfth to the first year of this programme.  Since each discipline is only represented by one course per semester for the first four semesters, a lot of material needs to be covered to prepare the students for the intensive courses that they take in the third year.  Many students are unable to handle the pressure at this early stage.  For example, students who opted for Biology in 11th and 12th now have a hard time keeping up with their peers in their first year Mathematics course (and vice versa).

b) Once a student decides to major in a subject A in the third year, she again has to make a big jump from what she studied in A in the first two years and the advanced material that she sees now in the third year.  Does one course of A each semester in the first four semesters adequately prepare the student to make an informed decision about choosing A as a major and then undertake five intensive courses of A each semester in the third year?  Keeping this in mind, when instructors try to ensure that students in the first two years have the necessary pre-requisites for year 3 by following a challenging course syllabus, many students experience burn-out.


There was some serious rethinking about these matters from the course-structure point of view rather than the quality-of-student point of view and various remedies were suggested.  Somewhere between the extreme of narrowing down a student to one subject in the first year itself and that of making all courses "gentle" was found the right balance.  Basically, the incline from one year to another has been made more gradual.

As per the new structure, which has now been approved by the senate,
a) Just as before, students will take one course per semester in each of the sciences in the first year.
b) In the second year, students will now choose three sciences of their interest and take three courses per semester in each of the chosen subjects.   These courses will be more rigorous than the first year courses.
c) In the third year, the student will choose a major from among the three subjects chosen in the second year.

The new structure has generated enthusiasm among many faculty members.  We feel that it gives us more space to introduce the most fundamental aspects of our fields in the first two years in a way that students have enough time to follow and digest what is being taught to them.  

Each department now has the fundamental task of redesigning the first year course and introducing appropriate new courses in the second year.  The next couple of weeks will be spent doing this as the new plan will be put into action in the coming semester.

I would like to hear from readers about the undergraduate course structures at their institutes in the initial years and their thoughts about it, either as a student or instructor (or both).