Sunday, September 30, 2012

Skills and Success

In the interview with Livemint, three professors (BN Jagtap, Satyam Suwas, Yamuna Krishnan) give their opinion on the skills required in science.

The skills for science: “You have to be passionate about learning new things. Scientists are a curious and inquisitive lot. It’s important to ask risky questions. Also, be prepared to fail and to experiment all the time. Through school we learn about Galileo, Newton, Darwin or Einstein, and science seems like an individual pursuit. I always tell my students that science is teamwork.”

The skills for science: “Dedication, passion and perseverance is what it takes to be a scientist. Unless you have passion, you’ll get tired soon. You may not succeed in a few attempts, so you have to keep trying.”

The skills for science: “In terms of attitude, I would say you would need curiosity and passion, knowing how to work as a team, flexibility about the path to reach your goal, and belief in your abilities to realize it.”

Based on my experience, I feel to be called successful, you need the above skills and a couple of other "skills". These "skills" are apparent if you read the interview given by Murali Kartik to Cricinfo,

What's the one question the media should stop asking you?
The one about who I upset in the hierarchy to not find a strong footing in the India squad.

If you were an Under-19 cricketer today, what advice would you give to the teenage Murali Kartik?
Keep your mouth shut.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think there is nothing new about their views

Anonymous said...

There is nothing new in their views but I found Prof. Giridhar's views very interesting...

Anonymous said...

Dear Sir,
If anybody takes project associate position, is there any chance that he/she can be apply to Phd without writing any entrance?in any dept.

Anonymous said...

Sir i'm an mtech student at IIT kgp and want to pursue my Phd from IISc. i have a low cgpa in my btech but i'm doing good in my mtech program. I would like to know that would the low Gpa in btech affect my admission to the Phd program in iisc ??

Anonymous said...

An excerpt from the essay on the Russian School by G. Falkovich from "A Voyage Through Turbulence"

"Under one of the most oppressive regimes in the twentieth century, in the country, which lost most of its educated class to emigration, civil war and terror, and was often plagued by war, diseases, poverty and hunger, great mathematical and physical schools flourished. Scholars raised in these schools had a specific code of behavior. Long corridors chats were the most effective forums of exchanging the latest ideas. Most seminars had no sharply defined ends, some even had no clear beginning, as the people came before to discuss related subjects [55]. Everyone worked inside a coherent group of people familiar with the details of each other’s work (a downside was that some people never had much incentive to learn how to present their
results to the outside world). Much has been said about the aggressive style and interruptions at Russian seminars. One must however understand the context: in a life which was a sea of official lies, doing science was perceived
as building a small solid island of truth; even unintentional errors risked decreasing the solid ground on which we stand. Landau used to say: “An error is not a misfortune, it is a shame”. One is reminded of monastic orders
that preserved and advanced knowledge during the dark ages (though in other respects, most Soviet scientists weren’t monks). A more prosaic reason that bonded people within a school was an impaired mobility of scientists -
recall that both Kolmogorov and Landau had a postdoctoral period abroad, a possibility denied to most of their students†. Still, the main attraction of the schools was the personalities of the leaders. By radically restricting creative activities, a tyrannical society channeled the creative energy into the narrow sector of natural sciences and mathematics.
Russian society is more open now, and the choice of science as one’s
occupation is rarely placed in the context of morality. Will we ever again be blessed with universalist geniuses of the caliber of Kolmogorov and Landau?"