Are we inclusive?

Should you do a PhD or not!

#PhDstudents, #advanced: To start with, I will suggest you to read an important piece of article by Dr. Elisa De Ranieri, the editor of Nature Energy. Its called 'I wish someone had told me'. Elisa gave a firing lecture in Third Infinity 2015. I will soon upload that here.

Where did I leave that 'impatient me'?

#undergraduates: My research interest in biosensing dates back to my undergraduate days. Back then, I proposed a research which I thought could be doable before my undergraduate due to the huge amount of zeal I had which did not allow me to understand the practical hindrances. I used to complain to Suresh (my research supervisor at IISc) about the laziness of the technicians. I understand that Suresh used to keep blowing oxygen into my fire. He always used to keep my motivation up even though the surroundings were full of lazy technicians. I realised back then that if you want to do something do it by yourself - each and every single step (for example, back then, we even created syringe pump, spin coater, and the end a working microcontroller controlled biosensor). Today, I see that impatient me on another undergraduate student working with me for his first full-fledged research. This section is for all those scientifically motivated undergraduates. Be impatient, which makes all the makers space! However, be smart and extract as much as possible from your supervisor! Good science or creative work becomes beautiful when we talk and collaborate with 'beautiful minds'. We are all Homo sapiens. Our brain works in a similar manner. There is no biological difference between a shopkeeper and scientists. The only difference is a scientist spend a huge amount of time on science to solve a particular scientific problem. The timeline, in that case, could be years to several lives. From my own experience, keeping aside the success stories of Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein, the problem I proposed during my undergraduate still remained unsolved and I am still working on it, which even led me to pursue academic degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics beside Biotechnology. Besides the formal academic degrees which I happened automatically while pursuing my dream projects, I even spend a huge amount of time on chemistry, mathematics, electronics, and making nanostructures using electrons. I am really thankful to Suresh that I met him at the first place and for making me understand that how to become a scientist!

'What did the poor do wrong?' that they are not gifted or extraordinary in contrast to rich people.

#highschool, #undergraduates: In this post, I will write about Inequalities in Science. I will mention specifically from the Indian perspectives that how to pursue a scientific career or at least keep your inquisitive nature alive forever in a country like India or in the Europe. The topic is extremely relevant today when the pieces of information are at our fingertips or for that matter 'OK Google' or 'Alexa' away. Do we really need a teacher? When risk high enough that to get a bad teacher (in Professor Walter Lewin's language a criminal). While a writing research proposal with Professor Eric Mazur, I came to know about a term that he coined from his teaching experience at Harvard 'Peer Instruction'. Is that the way to go? Or is it much more effective to allow a child to perform complete self-learning? Indeed, the later one is more evolution as well as cognitive revolution-friendly. The Victorian style of schooling is out of the question because there is no one today who is going to force you or stupefy you and ask you to perform. It is unfortunate that it is still the way most of the countries are practising education.

I was fortunate to study in a school which believed in the Tagorian ideology of learning from Nature i.e., nearly same as self-learning. My complete primary education i.e., until class V, I did not give any examinations. We had a fantastic time table of practising art and crafts, physical activities, open air lectures, going to Nature learn there and so on. My report card used to be covered with our own hand drawn or crafted works where the comments from the class teacher could be 'he/she started learning how to eat alone' and 'he/she has a nice artistic hand'. Later, in the secondary education, in order to merge us into the standard educational style of the world, we used to have examinations but as less and casual as possible. For example, when we were asked to write an essay we were asked to draw picture along side the essay. Now, can a teacher really judge how good is drawing from the other and give marks on that? On the same line, how can you give score to a child's writing? Everyone has there own thought-process each and everyone of them are beautiful from unimaginable perspectives. Who are we to judge a kid's imagination? Recently, my brother got very poor marks in a physics examination. I was bewildered to hear that because we always have firing discussion on science especially on physics. He asks questions which generally cannot be answered so easily and often he is criticised for asking these kind of questions in his school. He likes to reinvent physical lwas by himself. This attitude itself is research. So, how can one judge a answer sheet of such student and give him marks which the teacher barely understands. I am sure he derives physical laws in his own form, which is unfamiliar to the teacher.

Yesterday, I came to know about a fantastic experiment performed by Professor Sugata Mitra. He proved that at this age of overflowing computational power when the children do not want to learn the arithmetic operators or for that matter how to write using your fingers or learn a new language, self-learning is the best way and that's how humans have evolved to be on the top of the food chain to serve 25% of our total energy to our brain even though we do not have sharp large nails or venomous stings or for that matter 360 degrees vision.

Professor Mitra's talk before TED prize:

https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud 

Professor Mita's talk after TED prize:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtUl2CP8ak 

To be continued...

Alphen a/d Rijn, 01.04.2017

An optimal PhD supervisor 

#PhDstudents: Today, I could see myself on a first year PhD student who was thinking that he is extremely involved in this project and there is no point discussing small details about his project where he is facing some difficulties... Hence, I decided to share some of my previous experiences on the same feelings... Before I forget about this I will write this point here and I promise to elaborate this point very soon. 

Alphen a/d Rijn, 31st March 2017

In pursuit of a thinker

#Advanced, #PhDstudents: Yesterday, I had a long discussion while driving back home with another postdoc about how a PhD training should be. In this context, I will write about the current situations in many universities and in contrast to that I will write about my graduate school i.e., IMPRS-PBCS which has the reputation of finishing PhD studies within four years. I will come back to this point soon.

Alphen a/d Rijn, 31st March 2017

The city that celebrates scientific achievements

I almost do write everything in LaTeX

I must say, Netherlands is one of the best places where you could find some high quality PhD thesis. From my experience from India, UK, and Germany, I would keep Dutch theses at the top when it comes to formatting as well as the quality of science.  I found a nice resource of LaTeX based thesis writing from Delft: https://3d.bk.tudelft.nl/ken/en/2016/04/02/my-latex-thesis-workflow.html