Awarding degrees

Professor Dheeraj Sanghi writes about the new IITs and how they are not eligible to award degrees in 2012 if the bill is not passed in the Parliament. I do not understand why the new IITs should award degrees for the batch graduating in 2012. IISER graduated a batch last year and they did not award any degrees but I am sure that the students are doing fine. They are also not eligible to award degrees because the NIT amendment bill has not been passed by the Parliament. However, you can be assured that the government is working hard to get this bill passed soon, maybe in the next couple of years. I think we place too much importance on awarding degrees.


Of course, I am being sarcastic.

Faculty salaries

From the chronicle

The latest project that looks at professorial paychecks shows that the United States lags behind Canada, India, Italy, and South Africa when it comes to the purchasing power of their salaries and academic fringe benefits, according to data compiled jointly by the Laboratory for Institutional Analysis from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and the Boston College Center for International Higher Education.

Job offers

When I was reading the article, "Withdrawing From a Job You've Accepted", in the chronicle and its comments, I am reminded of a recent incident. A person X, who had his basic degree in IIT and Ph.D in a top 5 school in USA, applied to six IITs last year and was interviewed in all of them. All of these IITs made him offers. Finally, he joined a newly established IIT. However, within a year, he wanted to leave this IIT and join an older metro IIT and, guess what, he has been offered there and will join there next month. The faculty brought equipment worth crores for starting up his research in the newly established IIT and now that he is leaving this IIT, I do not know whether this equipment will be used by the rest. But as the above article ends,

As someone told me along the way: Watch out for yourself, because no one else will. I would add: And be prepared to live with the consequences.

Leadership

Mr. Greg Chappell at his pontificating best

Chappell then spoke about what was wrong with the Indian culture. "The culture is very different, it's not a team culture," Chappell said. "They lack leaders in the team because they are not trained to be leaders. From an early age, their parents make all the decisions, their schoolteachers make their decisions, their cricket coaches make the decisions. The culture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it. Knock your head off. So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility. The Poms (British) taught them really well to keep their head down. For if someone was deemed to be responsible, they'd get punished. So the Indians have learned to avoid responsibility. So before taking responsibility for any decisions, they prefer not to."

Ph.D fellowships

Just when IISc has decided to stop admission to non-GATE qualified students for its direct Ph.D (i.e., after B.E./B.Tech) programme, IIT-Gandhinagar has announced the following

In  order  to  attract  students  of  IITs,  NITs,  and  certain  top engineering colleges in the country to its Ph. D. programme, the Institute  is  offering  direct  admission  to  fourth  year  B.  Tech. students  regardless  of  whether  they  have  qualified  GATE.  An additional fellowship of Rs 10, 000 per month will be given to the
students who qualify GATE.

How do you define a top engineering college? Should one go by the rankings, where Amity University is ranked 18 while IISc is ranked 41.

Pinned post for prospective faculty to IITs/IISc

This is a pinned post for prospective faculty to IITs/IISc. Please, please read this site and the old posts, here, here, here, here, and here. There are over 1400 comments and replies to these comments in these posts.