Rendezvous
with IITK leadership @ Santa Clara, CA:
Meeting with IITK
potential faculty candidates
[No,
this is not a follow-up to my
previous post on board toppers, IIT-JEE toppers, etc. Before my relatively poor
memory gives away last weekend’s experiences, I thought I’d write them down.]
“It’s
like a modern day arranged marriage in India where the boy’s family visits the
girl’s family, and the girl has to say ‘yes’ before the marriage can be arranged.
We are the boy’s family now and you are the girl’s.”
A
(surprisingly) pleasant sense of humor from the IITK leadership set a very
relaxing, laid-back and informal mood for a highly informative and enriching
session. It was a sunny and warm afternoon outside 2903 Bunker Hill Lane, Santa
Clara in California on June 16 (Saturday). The leadership of IITK including the
director, dean of research and planning, chair of EE department, etc. had arrived
for a unique event organized in conjunction with the IITK alumni association in
USA. Besides celebrating a reunion among IITK alumni, there was an agenda of having
an interactive session with potential faculty candidates for IITK. There were
about twenty such candidates (including myself) who got a chance to ‘see’ the
finer details of IITK.
The
event was partitioned into two sessions, one on Saturday afternoon and the
other on Sunday morning till post noon. During the first session which was also
decked by an inspirational Narayana Murthy speech, we were updated on the
current status of IITK, and why the event was organized after all. So I came to
know that IITK has the highest endowment fund among all IITs which is around
$45 million with IITB being at second place with an endowment fund of around
$22 million. It seems IITK is facing a faculty crunch (I guess it’s true for
most of the other IITs as well) with an estimated 250 vacancies to be filled in
the next 7.5 years. So the leadership at IITK aims at hiring around 30-40
faculty members every year. Now that is of course a challenging task I believe,
but they said that they would not dilute the quality of faculty members to meet
this end. Hence the leadership was here in the USA to interact with potential
candidates helping us understand the application process, as well as
encouraging us to apply for faculty positions in IITK. Of course, this
interaction has absolutely nothing to do with the chances of an application
being accepted or rejected, because that depends on the candidate’s merit and
the specific department to which he/she is applying, we were told.
I
came to know of certain interesting (and appealing!) facts about working in
IITK. The most appealing one was of course the extra Rs. 25k per month that
IITK pays to all new faculty members irrespective of discipline or anything,
over and above the usual pay of like Rs. 65k per month. Now Rs. 90k per month is
quite a nice salary for a starting assistant professor J.
I am being lightly humorous of course, because money is not the primary incentive for people (or researchers) like us. We,
researchers, as far as I can conclude, take much more pleasure and satisfaction
in finding things out and doing new things than earning fat paychecks, or else
why will young PhDs (in engineering) give up jobs that pay more than $100k/year
in the USA to go to India for a Rs.65k per month job? Money is no doubt
quintessential for survival. If my family has an emergency, I need money. A
decent lifestyle in any place on the world necessitates money. However, its
charm doesn’t match the pleasure of finding things out (besides that of staying
close to family in IndiaJ). Another nice thing about IITK is that
the leadership explained about their help and assistance in solving typical two
body problems of the candidates, which fortunately, I am not worried about for
myself as of nowJ.
The
second session on Sunday was a presentation session, where each candidate gave
a brief talk about his research work, his research interests, on why he wanted
to join IITK and what his plans would be for research and teaching at IITK. It
was really informative, encouraging and engaging as well. I was delighted to
see quite a few of the candidates willing to set up labs in India thereby boosting
my levels of optimism. This is because I am an experimentalist and require a
lot of equipments and lab spaces to conduct research, and it was really nice to
meet and get inspired from quite a few experimentalists ready to go to India
for faculty positions! I read somewhere that 80% of the dissertations that come
out of India every year are theoretical in nature. No offense to theory or
simulation which form a vital part of any research, but I strongly believe that
unless we have a strong experimental research base in the institutes and
universities across India for developing quality and ‘technologically relevant’
work, we Indians are never going to
be anywhere close to USA or China in terms of technological prowess and
leadership. And no, I am not
speaking of software programs and IT industry now.
Finally
we had a one-on-one chat with the director, professors and the dean and they
all answered our multiple queries ranging from availability of lab spaces to the
scene of securing grants from DST. I found the IITK leadership very
rejuvenating and inspiring, and I left with a pretty high and impressive
opinion about the various aspects of working at IITK.
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