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).

A very friendly blogger

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."

Generation gap?

Like many other new institutes, the faculty at N1 almost entirely consists of young members within five to ten years of their PhD.  The associate professors (few) and full professors (fewer) can be counted on fingertips.  Our senior colleagues have substantially contributed to the growth of N1 and by their accomplishments and experience, have been able to give direction to the institute.  What I also admire about them is that they left good positions in established institutes and roughed it out in a new set up and at the same time, managed to keep their research programmes going.  Their commitment and leadership is deeply appreciated.

Sometimes, however, there is a bit of a gap in communication between the younger faculty (YF) and senior faculty (SF) members.  I would like to share an example of how something said by YF can be misinterpreted by SF and vice versa.

A lot of heated conversations are centered around the balance between teaching and research.  On joining, the message that most of us get is that while there should be no compromises in teaching undergraduate courses in our flagship programme, eventually our performance will be judged on the basis of our publications and research grants.  Those of us who did their PhD/postdocs in North American universities have had prior teaching experience and have also seen our supervisors/postdoc guides balancing and actively performing both duties.  On the other hand, many of my colleagues have joined after doing postdocs in research institutes in India and Europe.  Thus, they may not have had any teaching experience prior to joining here and have come out of a system where undergraduate education was not given much priority.

Faced with the challenges of teaching their first course and trying to carve out an independent identity in the research world simultaneously, some YFs are occasionally heard saying that their teaching duties take time away from their research work.  I would not doubt  the commitment of a colleague who says this towards teaching well.  I would only think that my colleague is dealing with time management issues, an important part of the learning curve of any faculty member and is frankly sharing his/her struggles with others.

Unfortunately, however, if our SFs hear this, more often than not, they will angrily retort and say that they had much heavier teaching loads when they started out and that YF has it much easier and therefore should not complain.  SF might even make a general statement on the lines of ``People should not make teaching an excuse for their lack of productivity."  Perhaps, SF is making a general statement, but YF will be stunned because s/he has been very productive.  Needless to say, this conversation may not end very well.

SF's reaction is based on the assumption that YF was making teaching load an excuse for weakness, where as all YF was doing was harmlessly interacting with colleagues and sharing his/her struggles.  On the other hand, even though SF made an off-hand general remark, it is next to impossible for YF to not take it personally!  Perhaps, it might have been better if SF too had shared some stories of their early career days or given some advice. While it is considered impolite to offer unsolicited advice, surely unsolicited advice is better than unsolicited criticism?

Teaching was only one example.  Similar conversations can also happen around other issues like research facilities, lab/office space, personal facilities like transport, housing etc.

On a personal note, I often don't mind when a senior says things like ``I had it much harder," provided the senior gives a concrete example and describes how s/he handled it.  I get this a lot from my father and it usually has the desired effect.
When I was describing the above situation to him the other day, his reply was:

`` In army, a junior will not dare to open his mouth when a senior is talking.  You academic people have it much easier."

I will leave it to the readers to agree or disagree with my father :)















  

Connected and unwell!

Oh well!

Perhaps, having internet at home is not such a good thing after all.

This year, I am one of the coordinators of the summer research programme at our institute.  We received a very large number of applications by email [1] and by spending an hour everyday, I was gradually processing them and forwarding them to the concerned faculty members [2].  With internet at home, however, I spent all of Sunday (morning till late night) working on this, forwarded about 500 remaining applications in one go and felt happy and relieved (and grateful to have internet at home).  Today morning, I woke up with a severe headache and could not hold myself together after teaching my morning class.  So, I had to take a day off.  Come evening and I am down with fever :-(

Oh well!!

   

[1] Yes, I am aware that a smarter method of processing applications for academic activities is by encouraging web based applications, which also sorts them out and prepares databases.  Our team of coordinators totally underestimated the number of applications that our summer programme will receive and have learnt this the hard way!


[2] This has been an interesting learning experience.  I now know the key research areas of many of my colleagues.  I also know that those colleagues who have words like cancer, nano, cosmology, neuro  or anything "quantum" on their research profiles are likely to receive the maximum number of applications from students with very ambitious research programmes.  For example, one student, who applied to work with a faculty member specializing in neural science,  wants to explore how to make dead men speak!