An M.Phil. Story
How I Learned to Do Research and Make Mistakes Along the Way
The BJP government yesterday unravelled their next big ‘reform’ plan for the ailing education sector. While the details are still awaited but initial reports suggest that a major overhaul is in the making going by the document that was released yesterday by the newly appointed education minister. The document boasts of worthy objectives like increasing the budget allocation to 6% of G.D.P. (a decade long objective yet to be achieved), a new four-year undergrad program (FYUP), with multiple exits and entry points (which can be useful if implemented well) and also the ambiguous goal of making universities ‘multidisciplinary’ by the year 2040.
This is not a critical take on the overall document; as mentioned above, details of the overall policy are yet to be released. I, however have a comment on the new education policy’s sheer neglect of the value of an M.Phil. degree. A disclaimer here is needed, I have done an M.Phil., and it may seem that my opinions come from a place of bias. But as an early career academic, I would like to argue that in something as important as higher education — especially owing to uncertain paths of conducting research — personal experiences matter.
What is An M.Phil.?
M.Phil. or Master of Philosophy (in any discipline) in the simplest terms is a pre-PhD intensive research training course. In social sciences, it usually focuses on three fundamentals of research training:
- Key philosophical debates around social science research or scientific research;
- Issues of ontology, epistemology, and methodology; and
- Training in diverse research methods that research has to offer.
At first glance, these three topics may seem something that can easily be covered in a crash course video on YouTube (or that is certainly the impression the education minister seems to be in). But that is hardly the case. Each topic on its own is eternally complex, and all three are connected in an intricate knot of inter-dependencies important to understand before proceeding with research, especially, on human populations.
By the end of an M.Phil., one usually learns the research methods and tools that are required to complete a small-scale research project of a short duration. One uses tools of data collection and analysis to work with and writes a dissertation to complete the M.Phil. degree — which is a considerable achievement, from personal experience.
The Case for M.Phil.
The National Education Policy (2020) document has done away with the M.Phil. course, as the education ministry feels that a Masters’s degree is sufficient for a person to pursue higher research, that is Ph.D. It also has paved the way for someone to undertake a Ph.D. if the person finishes their four-year undergraduate program with practical research. This can be true for exceptional cases where the student in question, apart from being hardworking, is an absolute genius. But is it wise to frame a policy based on exceptions?
In a country where plagiarism and data manipulation in research is criminally commonplace, it is hard to understand the decision to remove an essential entry point of academic research. The ministry’s argument seems to stem from the point that one can learn during their master’s degree or the FYUP, the necessary skills required to undertake a higher research degree. While it is acceptable that initiation into research in early stages of academics can be helpful, it is contingent upon factors such as — having an adequate number of faculty members (another huge lacunae of the Indian education sector) in universities, reworking the course structures in a way that incorporates the research and critical thinking skills mentioned in the previous section — and in the process manage the student who might get overwhelmed by the whole experience.
The Art of Opening Pandora’s Box
Getting overwhelmed is a feeling all too common for anyone doing research for a higher degree. It is here, that the case for M.Phil. becomes stronger. Doing an M.Phil. is like learning the art of opening Pandora’s box— it unloads a convolution of ideas and concepts which students need to make sense of before they proceed to research. For most people, it does get overwhelming at first — which is perfectly fine — as grapple with abstract ideas and they try to find coherence. One makes a lot of mistakes, which is where a supervisor helps — in guiding through. One learns from those mistakes and revels in the feeling of making fewer mistakes as they proceed — a significant achievement in early career research.
By the end of an M.Phil. degree one learns so much from making mistakes that undertaking a Ph.D. doesn’t seem like a daunting task. One learns by then, the art of dealing with the chaotic world of research. Apart from making things easier for people before going into a full fledged Ph.D. programme, M.Phil. can also be a lesson to those who realise that maybe research is not for them.
Imagine a scenario where a FYUP student or a Masters’s student, after completing their course, joins a Ph.D. programme. After a couple of years, the student feels disillusioned with research altogether and decides to leave the project or worse yet, plagiarise his/her thesis just to finish the course — or rather, get rid of it. In the case of the former, a person may have invested two years of their life into something that they realise they are not passionate about and rightly so, leave the course — but in the process may end up nothing to show for there is no certificate unless you finish the degree. In the case of the latter, the NEP 2020 might actually end up making things worse for the quality of academic research in India as pressures of doing research might take a calamitous toll, which could lead to rise in plagiarism down the line.
It is here, that having an intermediate degree like M.Phil. helps. It deals with the issue of disillusionment quite effectively. For instance, if someone joins an M.Phil. degree out of curiosity for research but later feels that he/she’s not up for it, they can still finish the course and get a degree out of it, as it is a shorter course compared to a full-fledged Ph.D. Furthermore, if by the end of M.Phil. a person realises that research indeed is something that fascinates them, then they would undertake their Ph.D. work with renewed vigour — which would lead to better research output, practices, and ethics.
Researching Around
At the end of the day, the path of research — across fields or disciplines — is a long and arduous one. It is a path of solitude that one chooses to take willingly as one is filled with a sense of exploration — both of the self and the world. You engage with Kant or Arendt or Bhabha or Ramanujan into a lonely dance with their works. You get to learn multiple perspectives about different vantage points, in effect broadening your horizon. You learn to love the granular details and never miss the chance to focus on the nuances of debates. But most important of all, you learn to love making mistakes and embrace learning from them instead of fearing them— and that is why M.Phil. is relevant. Letting it go, may be making a blunder which we may never recover from.’
Anand is a Ph.D. Candidate at Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology
