IISc opens its portals to undergraduate education by inviting applications from XII standard students. Today is the first day to apply online for the program. Being involved in various aspects of this program administratively (not academically), I am excited about the possible success of the program but also worried at the teething problems of infrastructure.
Anyway, my personal year round up for 2010. Days include Sat/Sun. Hours and days calculated from the time reporting gadget for google calendar.
Number of days outside Bangalore on official work :32
Number of days outside Bangalore on personal work : 14
Number of days in Bangalore on personal work : 7
Number of hours spent on committee work for IISc : 920
Number of hours spent teaching in IISc: 29 class hours
Number of hours spent on research work: ~2000
Number of journal papers published: 28
Number of citations obtained: 654
Number of journal papers reviewed: 93
Blog Stats:
Number of posts: 65
Number of visits: 101,778
Number (average) of comments per post: 14
Number of posts without comments:4
18 comments:
You published 28 papers and reviewed 93? That is amazing! How do you manage your time? A post on that topic would be very interesting!
If you work for nearly 3000 hours, like he does, that you can !
He has written about this before
http://giridharmadras.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html
I try to be organized. I maintain a whiteboard offline (see a picture here)
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B0vAYYwwwXzGMDQ5OGYxMTktYTBhZi00NWM1LWI4MTktNzg4ZTdmYTQyYjcy&sort=name&layout=list&num=50
and I use google tasks online, which is a copy of the whiteboard.
Reviews take 2-3 hours a paper; Publications take 20-30 per paper. This does not include discussions and planning for experiments. The credit for the publications goes entirely to my students. My inputs are not that great or useful, I believe.
The key is to organize time as intervals.
Tasks that can be completed by
5 min (answering email, a quick phone call), 20 min (...), 1 h
3 h, 30 h. The latter needs to split to suitable intervals. If I have an afternoon meeting from 2-3 pm and 4-5 pm, then between 3-4 pm, I can do around 10 tasks that take 5 min each instead of working something that will take 3 h to complete.
Google tasks with useful extensions can be a real help. See the dayhiker extension, combines google calendar and tasks.
When one does a lot of things, the key is to remain organized. I learnt it from the best faculty in IISc.
Best wishes,
Giridhar
Dear Prof. Madras,
A very happy new year to you! And, its amazing how you can squeeze so much work in so little time. It is always an inspiration to read your posts. Will look forward to many more this year.
BTW, a friend sent me this really funny post on engineering nostalgia. I don't know if you were ever a fan of metallurgy, but you might enjoy the post from Jan 3:
http://peanutexpress.blogspot.com/
regards
Bharat
Thank you for the very useful tips Prof Giridhar!
BTW, although we academics love to undersell ourselves, I would say be careful of being too modest ("The credit for the publications goes entirely to my students. My inputs are not that great or useful, I believe.")... sometimes (and I have experienced this) people take such statements literally!!!
The link for the "Whiteboard Offline" picture is broken. Could you please correct it?
Thanks!
Is the whiteboard link broken? It seems to work for me. Anyway, here it is.
http://tinyurl.com/giriwhiteboard
Bharat, thanks for the link. I will read that.
Skeptic, I agree with you. People take whatever they want. If they want to select a student, they will attribute all his publications to him but if they do not want to take him, they will attribute all of it to his advisor. In my case, majority of the credit should indeed go to my students. I am sure my productivity would be become lower if the quality of the students becomes lower.
Best regards,
Giridhar
Simply one word on the whiteboard: WOW!!!
Having nothing else to do, I matched the whiteboard entries on the papers accepted to your list of publications on yoru website. They match perfectly !
How do you maintain a copy of the offline whiteboard online?
Baskar
Baskar,
I maintain an exact copy of the offline whiteboard in Google tasks. I use an extension in google chrome, which will show me the google tasks and my google calendar in one click.
Of course, my publication list will match with the whiteboard unless the paper is rejected by a particular journal but accepted by an another journal.
Thanks
Giridhar
Wow. As a reasonably well-cited person myself (ISI Highly Cited) let me tip my virtual hat to you. 1 paper is a good year, and 9 reviews are about as much as I can manage
Dr. Giri,
Thanks for your helpful advice!
Would you also share with us the aspects which you are still trying to fine-tune, or possibly the goals you were unsuccessful in meeting?
This will also help us to understand what could have been done better, though your achievements for this year are outstanding.
The problem is correctly estimating the time required for a given task.
When one is correcting the fifth draft of the research paper, you may underestimate the time required because the student did not implement all the corrections mentioned in the fourth draft ! Similarly, the committee meetings are notoriously difficult to estimate. I think this requires the correct calibration that comes only from experience.
Thanks
Giridhar
sir, i am student who is willing to apply for iisc ug programme but the problem is that i have passed my 12th exam in 2009.
is their anyway i can be eligible for this course now?
i am giving aieee and nest this year.
No, you are not eligible to apply for the UG program.
BTW, what about stats related to blog? Number of posts. Comments per post, visitors, visitors per post etc! Just kidding! You are really extraordinary!
Dear Anon,
I have now included the stats of the blog. Thanks for the suggestion !
Best regards
Giridhar
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