Preparation for an academic career or an Olympic Gold medal, both have a lot of commonalities.
Grades don’t matter
There has been ample amount of literature written about why grades don’t define success, and why they should not be held as a yardstick to determine success.
These kinds of articles are mostly written by people who climbed the success ladder despite having not so good grades. Einstein’s school teacher had once told that, “He will never amount to anything.” [Guardian]. We all have heard or read a lot on the topic of importance/lack of importance of grades in life.
I wonder if survivorship bias is at play. I have never read an article which talks about grades don’t matter…
World’s biggest student population got confined to the four walls. Many had to gulp the bitter pill of reality. Computational PhDs would flourish in the next decade. Adapting research projects according to changing times is a blessing in disguise.
Background
We all know that the world had gone under lockdown a couple of months ago due to the pandemic. The good thing is that some of those countries have started coming back to normalcy, but countries like India are still not entirely out of the lockdown.
This article sheds light on the situation/plight of students, especially the PhDs and Post-docs in India. This has been done with an example of taking these PhDs as a separate hypothetical country called “The Great PhD”.
Some Statistics
- In 2011, India had 315 million students [TOI]. If it had been a country, it would have been…
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We invite all the present and past PhD/Post-docs from all fields to contribute. You can write on any topic in the universe (and beyond 🤓).
From…
It is not enough to be good at something; you have to be famous for that. Being a bad person is ok; being infamous is worst.
Background
Many parts of India went under lockdown in March 2020 due to the pandemic. During the lockdown, came the news of the shortage of PPE kits, sanitisers, ventilators, hospital beds. Some of the news pieces which I still see during the lockdown: how some of the hospitals are rejecting Covid-19 patients, how some of these hospitals are charging exorbitant prices for Covid-19 treatment.
Amidst all of this chaos, many of the companies started manufacturing sanitisers and masks. Some of them began certifying these masks with their version of N95 certification. I wonder how many of these were genuine.
Social Media
My social…
It is our future generations who will pay the price of our racial, communal, bigoted behaviour. The current one is already paying up the price for the actions of our grandparents.
In the midst of Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic, Amazon Prime India launched a movie named 7500starring Joseph Gordon Levitt in the lead role. The movie description on Amazon Prime India reads [1],
“When terrorists try to seize control of a Berlin-Paris flight, a soft-spoken young American co-pilot struggles to save the lives of the passengers and crew while forging a surprising connection with one of the hijackers.”
Before June 2020, I did not know that a movie by this name exists. When I read the above description, I was hoping to see a non-muslim terrorist. I was…
Pay the wages on time. Job losses are in vogue right. An Indian company went against the worldwide trend and raised salaries of its employees.
Ever since the lockdown started, the Indian news outlets got filled with people stranded in the different parts of the country, away from their loved ones. I am fortunate to be at home while the world outside is becoming chaotic day by day.
I opened my LinkedIn only to see my feed filled with layoffs and rescinded job offers. Mind you that these graduates who lost their jobs are from top institutes in the country who are writing ferociously about their rescinded job offers. June-July is the graduation time in most part of the country. …
The value of hard-earned labour, empathy and the importance of timely salaries in tough times
This week I cleaned my bathroom, which had not been washed for some time. First things first, bathroom cleaning was way harder than I had imagined. A job which I thought would take a few minutes ended up sucking up an entire two hours of my afternoon.
After cleaning my bathroom, I took some rest and was having tea. I started thinking about the people who do this for a living. Housekeeper, maid, gardener, janitor. They hardly come under the limelight. These important people who make our lives easy are remembered only when they are absent from their job or…
From getting into an excellent academic institution to landing a job at a world leader in wire drawing to going back to academics, luck and randomness have played a crucial role in my life.
The year 2011 changed my entire life. I got into College of Engineering Pune (COEP — founded in 1854, Asia’s third oldest engineering college), despite scoring miserably in its entrance exam (I had scored 125/200). Going back to that year I realised how lucky I was to get into that legendary institute which has Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, the Father of Indian Engineering, as its alumnus [1],[2]. Fast forward to the present, and I got featured in IIT Madras’ research scholar’s video.
Where it all began
I was an introvert from an all-boys Urdu medium school named National Urdu High School. It was in a…
Sufyan M. Shaikh
Friend, Son, Brother, Materials Reseracher. I write if I get time, read if I don’t. PhD candidate at IIT Madras. linkedin.com/in/sufyanshk
