Of bean counting and bridge building

Engineering graduates in this part of the world, are increasingly finding bean counting as an interesting job! What else can explain the number of engineering graduates enrolling for a class which prepares aspirants for a clerical job in public sector banks. I haven’t conducted any survey on this, but I can easily count to a minimum of 8 fellows known to me who have either got into some banks as clerks or who are preparing for bank exams. Here are two different stories about engineering admissions.

Story One: My cousin and her husband, both civil engineers in Central Government Dept. are hell bent in making their daughter a civil engineer. With less that 50% marks in Math, and with her heart inclined toward English Literature, the daughter is now enrolled for a course in civil engineering. Wonder how she builds bridges!

Story Two: A studious girl, with more than 95% marks in her +2 exams has no idea other than follow what her parents choose for her. Her parents enrolled her for a course in an engineering college, which could possibly rank within 1 to 10 from bottom. When asked why this college when she could easily get admitted to some really good ones, the reply was, “We  just want her to earn an engineering degree so that she can appear for bank exams and become a clerk”. When further asked, then why engineering rather than a degree in commerce or so, the reply was, “these days every one who gets into a bank has a engineering degree, and so she too”.

Good luck to both of you, and whoever uses the bridge the fellow in story one is forced to build.

PhD by KITA

A research student works in the principle of KITA. KITA is the acronym made famous by the celebrated author on motivation, Herzberg. It simply unfurls as Kick In The Ass.

Oh yeah, that is what we researchers do to get ourselves motivated. Kick in not anyone’s ass, but in ones own and not by anyone else, but by the person alone. That is only how a research can be done. Research can’t be done at gunpoint (data can be collected thus, though). It is to be self motivated and with some amount of eustress. The research supervisor often does not really pay attention to the student because he knows research can’t be done with force. There is a time for it, and it is for sure. Some may have to wait for it and others may have to build it.

There can be days, weeks and months with no progress at all. Nothing to do. And all of a sudden the vault opens and 24 hours seem like few minutes. That is when dejection, disappointment and disengagement makes way for plethora of activities in short notice. Hardly can anything be planned for a research, although veterans strongly recommend having a plan and research diary and stuff. There is virtually no research student who would not have atleast once wondered why has he taken up this task anyway? But the experience and learning is fabulous – not just the subject part, but with regard to the patience required, KITA, reading, writing, reviewing..

I am often asked  - so dong a PhD ah? How long is the course? I say ah well.. this is not a course but research to be done at ones own pace and interest, so it cant be compartmentalized into these many years. Takers are few for this explanation. So now I say 4 years. But what if this gets extended more than 4 years? I’ve an answer : I flunk in few papers and am yet to pass those, hence the delay, I’ld say. I can see those smirks in the faces. 

Time for a  KITA ..

When Diagram?

Balanji asked me "Long time no see". Well yeah, it is indeed long time since I opened my own blog.

Few changes happened. I was in a corporate. I wanted to do a PhD, so to prepare for that I abandoned the big Hairy Corporate World and moved into academics for last 3-4 months and boy! did I enjoy!. It was so very cool. It was a well known Business School in Kerala.

Cutting things short, I am now dong my PhD at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore.Scholarship yes, but I'm living in austerity. Have a EMI to pay, have lots of things to take care, but then I realize if I miss this opportunity, the opportunity will show its bare-bottom to me and make faces the next time I look for it. I am already feeling old when placed among  my younger classmates. The campus is excellent, the canopy and the little benches to rest. This is one place where I am not made fun of when I go to the library and stay there for the entire day. A typical small talk in the campus is something like this
Person 1 : " Hey you. How you doing?"
Person 2: "Oh Hello.. all fine but still not able to get closer on to that"
Person 1 : "Oh is it? Were you able to get upto the 43rd equation, which says delta t minus e to the power square of xt"?
Person 2: "That was done long back, I am now stuck at the one at page number 822. the one which says the differential equation of sum of all t and gamma divided y epsilon theta..."

You get the picture.

I am now taking a course on Probability and Statistics, and I have so far learned what it feels like to be in a class of Russian, Zulu and Hebrew combined.
I now realize the importance of Venn Diagram. But by the time I make up my mind to understand a stated Venn diagram, the professor says "When Diagram?"

Gosh....

Of thesis and reports

How many of you really read a thesis or an academic project report? I have attempted few out of sheer interest in the topic, but frankly, I couldn’t read anything more than a couple of pages. Don’t you think it is so every irritating to read them, with all those superscript asterisks and numbers and all sort of funny notations which silently says “ Hey there, now stop reading this and bring your eyes to the bottom of this page, if you ever want to make heads and tails out of what follows”. Now we take a detour to the bottom of the page, printed in the finest of the prints or worse to the end of the chapter or even worse to the so called Appendix, get that clarified and get back to where we left.
By the time we get back we lose track of what ever we read and we might need to start from the previous paragraph.
This continues more or less like a cycle (like the infinite IF..THEN loop), until we finally get what the author means with the help of those references. These footnotes occupy about one fourth (if not more) of the page. When we proceed to the next page, after an hours struggle with the current one, there will be a reference to the Fig 2.1.4 (a). Now we will have to halt there and search for that horrible figure which might be in any of the pages. Same with the Table 1.34.4 and Illustration 17(w). The next sentence says ‘ As already mentioned in Chapter 2, Page 3, Sentence 14..’, which takes us to the said sentence and make us get back. Incase if the reader is still awake, there comes another reference in form of a superscript numeral, which makes us sift few pages to the end of the section.

By the time you finish the first few chapters, you would not be wondering how did you manage to pull out few strands of your own hair.

Seriously, if the real intention behind a research is sharing the newly found knowledge and for the benefit of he majority of the society, why on earth can’t it be in simple language? Why do academicians want to insist on following the above fashion? Mostly because, “Well, it has been always done this way”.
On second thought, may be those reports are made in such a way that only the deeply dedicated and genuinely interested people go through it completely, and still be sane.

Don’t you think this need some refinement and make it more readable?

With the advent of putting up research papers on the Internet as web pages, this could be reduced to a great extend. Those horrendous detour symbols can be replaced by hyperlinks, which could also have some pop-up (like a tool tip) on hovering the mouse over the link. Long live www.