Adapt, Survive, Thrive or Cease to Exist
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 the 4th most populated country in the world [as of 1 Aug. 2020].
- In 2019, India had 37.4 million students enrolled in higher education [MHRD]. If it had been a country, right now it would have been the 40th most populated country in the world, same as Morocco [as of 1 Aug. 2020]. We’ll name this country as The Great PhD.
- A first-year PhD student enrolled in a government-funded education institute (staying in institute hostel) in India earns roughly $400 per month, which is called the HTRA — Half-Time Research Assistantship.
- If we assume that all of the above 37.4 million (2.7% of Indian population) students are PhD students (which is incorrect), then the combine yearly net worth of these students will be about $2.4 billion, slightly below the GDP of Bhutan which is $2.46 Billion. GDP of Morocco is $118 billion [as of 1 Aug. 2020].
- Our hypothetical country “The Great PhD” would’ve been the world’s most highly educated, but one of the poorest countries in the world; a conundrum.
- According to Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Report (for India)(Accessed: 31 July 2020), the percentage of people in India commuting to their workplace reduce by 33% due to the lockdown. It means every 3rd working professional has stopped going to their workplace. This also has some percentage due to the students. Since all the school, college and universities went under complete lockdown; hence 100% of the students were confined to their respective homes or other places of stay.
To be or not to be…an experimentalist
Most of the citizens of our hypothetical country “The Great PhD” are experimentalists, i.e. they work on real experiments involving tissues, metals and alloys, automobiles, machines, chemicals, biological samples, etc.
Since The Great PhD went under lockdown, these nationals are taken away from their natural habitat (the Laboratory). They have been confined to the four walls of their homes. This has put a setback of at least four months to their research work.
Many of these experimentalists who dreaded computational work are now forced to sit for hours and hours in front of their computers. They are learning either a new programming language or a totally new computational research technique.
People who had started their experimental work were suddenly taken aback due to the lockdown. They were forced to either modify their research projects or completely change their research topics.
This is very similar to giving the interview for the post of an HR Manager and getting job offer of an R&D Engineer 😅. In either case, you are expected to perform at your full potential and with the utmost sincerity.
Some of them were in their final crucial stages of their PhDs when the lockdown started. These are the citizens of The Great PhD, who have suffered the most due to the pandemic.
They started as an experimentalist and ended up in a world which wants to maintain social distancing, even while handling machines in a cleanroom. That’s logical also because the most unclean object in a cleanroom is the scientists themselves.
People who started as experimentalists are now forced to say, “To be or not to be…an experimentalist”.
Blessing in disguise
Many people in India, especially the hardcore Metallurgy community, was not that friendly towards the computational work/scientists 2–3 decade ago. They had learnt their metallurgy by the age-old trial-and-error method and wanted to continue doing that. Old habits die hard.
If you are a computational scientist, then it was challenging to get proper funding. In many cases, it is still difficult to convince the funding agencies, especially if you are a new faculty, for a purely computational research project.
Once the pandemic hit, these very own staunch haters of the computational work are now forced to master these techniques. These experimentalists are now forced to call themselves “the Computational Materials Scientists/Engineers”.
I expect in the year 2023, many of the PhDs coming out of Indian universities will have computational work as a major component in their theses. This can put India on a global map of the world’s largest number of PhDs with computational research.
The current PhDs who will adjust to the new normal and modify their research work accordingly, are going to be an immense asset to their future employers.
Once graduated, they will become the future faculty, technocrats and decision-makers. It won’t take more than a decade to realise the benefits of these computational PhDs. India can become the global powerhouse of technocrats adept in solving complex engineering problems using various computational techniques. Right from studying the properties of a bunch of atoms to the entire jet engine. A blessing in disguise.
… what have YOU done in this project?
Last year in a poster session of an international conference, a judge asked one of my friend (paraphrased),
“Looks like everything is done by the computer. Can you please tell me what exactly YOU have done in this project?”
For starters, my friend is a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Material Science. His face went red when he heard that innocent yet demeaning question. He could not say anything but gulp his anger. Maybe a classic case of “right people, wrong place and utterly wrong timings”.
Fortunately, his research guide was humble enough to explain to him the situation and was asked not to take these kinds of questions seriously.
Questions like these are very usual in the experimentalists community. But, the times are changing. Hopefully, after the pandemic, people will realise the importance of computational work. They will at least think twice before asking this kind of absurd questions.
…more than a tool for exchanging emails
If we look around a typical research lab, what will you find:
- Microscopes connected to a couple of computers
- A universal testing machine connected to a computer
- A furnace with thermocouple connected to a computer
- A supercomputer again connected to a terminal
- and many other devices connected to their own separate computer
I had the pleasure of discussing these points with one of the super-friendly professors. The paraphrased conversation is below (Faculty — F, Me — M):
F: Look around yourself, can you tell me any equipment which is not connected to a computer?
M: No.
F: When you say that the furnace is at 1000 °C, then where do you see that temperature? Two wires coming from a calibrated thermocouple connected to a computer which responds to a change in voltage in those wires and converts that change in voltage into temperature. Simple. Rest of the work/signal manipulation is done by the computer. Still many people ignore the importance of computational techniques in research.
M: Yup. We just use computers for exchanging email and writing reports/research papers.
F: When a simple equipment requires a computer to check the temperature, then we should realise the importance of computers in our research life.
This simple conversation had a considerable impact on my perspective towards the research problem. Fortunately, by that time, I was already a PhD candidate in the universe of Computational Materials Science.
This conversation made me realise how rarely we used our computers to their full potential. In my opinion, one of the most under-utilised pieces of technology in our research lab is our very own laptops.
I have seen many people buying excellent configuration laptops, only to exchange emails, and use MS Office on them and watch YouTube. What a pity! They get terrified of seeing the black screen of the Terminal/Command Prompt window.
Concluding Remarks
This pandemic has wreaked havoc in many people’s lives. The economy has tanked, consumer demands are evaporated; many have been laid off. The research community has also suffered its fair share.
It has become the survival of the fittest and the smartest. Only those who will adapt to changing environment, are going to survive and thrive; rest, in the words of Thanos, will just “cease to exist!”
Disclaimer
Thank you for understanding that I am not a policymaker. The above article is my personal opinion. You are free to disagree, criticise, comment. What are your thoughts on the current PhD situation? Do let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your perspective. Feel free to point out any factual errors in the above article. I’d be happy to correct them.
