Finding “ good” students to work with us…

How do we have very good students doing research in our labs? There are two aspects: (1) having a good pool of students to select from; (2) selecting right students who are interested in doing research

Since Sandhya Koushika asked this question, let me jot down some thoughts I had about different ideas that we can try out.

Second aspect first: how do we identify students who are knowledgable (capable) and at the same time curious and passionate about research. Most of the institutes select/reject prospective PhD students based on a short interview. Often these interviews could be as short as 10 minutes! Most of us who have done this/gone through this know its limitations.

There is no easy route; we need to spend time to find good students. How do we do this?

1. We have now many good undergradudate (UG; BSc, BS, MSc included) teaching institutes (IITs, IISERs, many good universitites). Can we have a group of researchers (volunteers?) in each of these institutes who can assess some students over a period of a few months and share their assessment with others. For example, some of us in IIT Bombay can certainly spend some extra time and figure out who are good students in our Msc batch. In other words, we need to develop a mechanism to have really serious reference letters. This has to be a community effort, and may be we could have a discussion in conferences/meetings about the importance of writing proper reference letters.
   May be, there is also a possibility of a one-semester elective course for limited number of students (unlike typical large class); let me call it a “research aptitude” course (until I find a better name)! Unlike other courses, this should not be examination oriented; should have discussions/seminars. It could be designed such a way that anyone doing very well in this course can be considered as a student worth selecting for PhD program anywhere.
2. Another point is what Sunil Laxman wrote:

For long time, TIFR has been having VSRP; IIT Bombay has formal intership program (https://www.ircc.iitb.ac.in/fellowship/) and most institutes will have similar programs. This indeed is a way forward.

3. Another idea is, may be, once every fortnight or so we can have some interested (final year BSc/MSc) students from different colleges visit our institutes and give short seminars (on their favorite topic) and spend a day interacting with us. This could be spread throughout the year. Somewhat like a different version of selecting postdocs.

More basic question is, how do we create a good pool of students who are passionate to do research. There are no short-cuts here; no magic wand! If we want to have a pool of good researchers to select from, we need to work hard and train students; train undergraduate (BSc-MSc) students to think; train them to do research; train them to ask questions (not just answer questions). One of my pet peeves is that most of India’s leading research institutes do not train undergraduate(UG) students. India’s UG students do not have a chance to learn basics from the best researchers in India! I hope this will change, and all leading institutes will start UG teaching.