My former advisor Professor Ram Murty is visiting IISER Pune. While he was waiting in front of the coffee machine, a cleaning staff member helpfully asked him if he was here for a PhD interview (he has probably been given directions to do so to any unrecognizable person as our Main Building is full of PhD aspirants nowadays). After he started laughing, the cleaning person apologized and withdrew. Prof. Murty later said to me, “Maybe life is giving me another chance to do a PhD. This time, you become my advisor.” Later, my student joined us and we took him to a room where we asked him a lot of questions that kept him on the board for 4+ hours. This happens to be the room where we interview our PhD candidates – so, the jokes continued!
On a more serious note, he mentioned that he started supervising his first PhD student almost 10 years after finishing his PhD. From what I hear, in USA and Canada, faculty members usually don’t take students until they get tenured, nor are they expected to. Supervision of multiple students happens at an even later stage. On the other hand, in India (at least at research and teaching institutions), faculty members seem to start supervising much earlier in their careers. This is especially true for new institutes, which by default mostly get very young faculty and which have to build a PhD programme. At some of the new institutes, especially new IITs, even people with contractual appointments have started working with students. It is highly likely that the contractual appointments will be made permanent, but what is remarkable here is that these members are less than three years past their PhD.
Questions for readers:
1) Is it a good sign that the demand for PhD in India is as high as to require faculty to start supervising at a relatively younger age? Or is it something to worry about?
2) I am of course thinking from a Mathematics-centric viewpoint. Perhaps, it is more common in the experimental fields to start supervising at a much earlier age and in much larger numbers. If you are an academic, what is the trend in your field at your institute or university?
3) This also raises another question. How important are students for your research programme? Again, observing my experimental colleagues, it seems they really want to take students to work on their projects. Am I mistaken?
About the Author: Kaneenika Sinha is an assistant professor in mathematics at IISER Pune. Her research interests are in analytic number theory and arithmetic geometry. She blogs about life in Indian academia at http://academic-garden.blogspot.com and tweets at @kaneenikasinha.
Image courtesy: Suvasini Ramaswamy
Notes from ClubSciWri: This blog is a re-post from the author’s previous blogpost from May (2015) at http://academic-garden.blogspot.com
This work by ClubSciWri is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
