Us and Them, Where the Cultural Differences Lie and How to Do Research?
Oftentimes we get to hear from everyone around us and through the internet how IITs, NITs, IISc and several other tier 1 universities have received a world ranking among the top 300 or 700 institutions. Most of the time students assume it is due to the high placement rates in those institutions. What they fail to see are the efforts these institutions put in to receive such opportunities. How are they different from our own institution?
When a university receives a ranking it is based not only on the flashy placement stats but also on the student achievements, achievements of the professors, infrastructure and most importantly the research they conduct and the projects they are assigned. US News, one of the leading media companies that rank institutions worldwide, revealed that the institutions “have been ranked based on 13 indicators that measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations”. Most of the leading bodies that also publish global rankings adhere to the same methodology, the academic research performance.
When it comes to research and development these institutions seem far beyond our limits of thinking. Why is it so? How is the research culture different from our own? One thing that we can all agree on is that Tier 1 universities have incredible infrastructure, they possess all kinds of equipment in their laboratories and have a huge funding for deserving projects. But who exactly works on these projects?
Only B.tech students? No, one feature that every Tier 1 university has is a plethora of guides and mentors with experience working in their respective fields who help undergraduate students to start their journey in the field of research. These universities have numerous RAs, PhD students and M.tech as well as MS students who guide their fellow juniors and undergraduate students towards the path of research and development.
Tier 1 universities provide funding and a stipend to researchers, which is lacking in our college. Other than that these universities also receive funding from well-known companies and organizations to create laboratories that specialize in certain fields of research which would benefit society, the institute, its students as well as the organisations. They have specialized faculty and research teams consisting of students from their institutions, researchers from other universities and abroad, and specialized laboratories and funds dedicated to their research. They also hire interns to conduct research alongside their teams.
The research culture of these top-tier universities is indeed very different from ours hence they can easily do high-output research. However, the main question is — should that discourage us from trying? Absolutely not! Instead, it fuels us to reach greater heights and achieve results equivalent to theirs with the limited resources that we have and it sculpts us into skilled researchers and even better engineers who can tackle the problems thrown at us without fear.
Realistically speaking, motivation alone is not enough to fuel research, infrastructure is an indispensable component too. Infrastructure is available in our college too, not in the form of laboratories or funding but in the form of faculty members and alumni who are well-experienced in the field of research. They have been working in collaboration with researchers around the world, and what we can do is be a part of their team. The only thing we need to develop is the mindset of a researcher, and the rest we will receive once we are in the research team, starting from resources to funding.
One thing that should be mentioned in this context is AI-based research projects. Reliable data for these projects are easily available on the internet, and the computation power is available through servers, which can be accessed from anywhere around the world at a very cheap price or sometimes free. This is one of the reasons why AI research is flourishing nowadays. Lots of other research domains follow this decentralized concept so that researchers from around the world can contribute to it, no matter where they live or study.
Thus, the unavailability of infrastructure is a small issue or no issue at all. The key factor is our mindset, whether we want to conduct research with the resources available or just keep grumbling about what we don’t have.