Safe Path for Budding Academics in India

I think the world economic climate is pretty grim now. US academia seems to have suffered significant budget cuts in the recent past. Perhaps this is due to the condition of the US economy. The current debt of the US is reported to be around 15 to 16 trillion dollars and growing.

Will Indian academia be spared the problems that are currently afflicting US academia? I think a challenging economic climate in India may impact Indian academia too. How should budding academics in India chart out a safe course for themselves in this uncertain world economic climate?

The safe path for budding academics in India seems to be to clear UGC-NET for LS (Lecturer-ship), get appointment as an Assistant Prof. and then pursue a PhD. Time for PhD work can be difficult to make as teaching load may be 3 to 4 courses per semester. But job security is assured (after one becomes permanent) and the PhD can be done slowly, even over, say, a 10 year time period.

The big risk comes when one does PhD without an Assistant Prof. teaching position. Even if one is on a research fellowship I am given to understand that most of such fellowships at this junior level are time-bound (4 or 5 years). One day the fellowship will end and that's when the lack of permanent on-scale teaching position (Assistant Prof.) can hit very, very hard. By which time the young man/woman may be close to 30 years old! Even if he/she does win the PhD degree but does not have a job, they may find themselves in a severe life-crisis. Of course, this path provides far more time for PhD research work and so one can really delve into research fully and do possibly excellent research work.

The brilliant PhD holders will not be having any problems landing a job either in academia or in industry research. It is the less than brilliant that may struggle depending on the PhD job situation.

I think the problem may be quite challenging in the US now even for fields like CS. Starry-eyed youngsters may be under the impression that a US PhD program is the dream to be achieved and presume that there will be gold at the end of the US PhD rainbow in terms of an assured tenure-track faculty position. I am not entirely certain that that is the case now. There seems to be significant risk of even CS PhDs having to work for many years as adjunct (temporary) Professors/temporary researchers in the US which has (relatively) poor salary and perhaps no benefits. Perhaps industry research positions in the US are plentiful for CS PhDs now - I do not know for sure.

I was given to understand by an eminent Indian industry research correspondent that the Indian IT industry and Indian academic demand for CS PhDs is very good as of now. So, it seems that PhD scholars in the CS area in India need not be so worried about job prospects provided they do quality research work during their PhD program.

My intent in posting on this topic is just to ensure that the right job opportunities picture is presented to would-be (and current) PhD scholars. It certainly is not to be a scare-monger. If viewers of this post have input that presents a different picture (more positive hopefully) from what is presented I would be glad to receive it and be corrected.

Free Coaching for CSIR-UGC-NET Exam in AP University

I was very heartened to see this news report, "ANU tops in UGC-JRF-NET" in The Hindu a few days ago, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3920637.ece.

It mentions that Acharya Nagarjuna University (ANU) of Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh has topped the UGC-JRF-NET results in the country with 142 applicants clearing the Lecturer-ship level of the exam. It also mentions that 4 applicants cleared the JRF (research fellowship) level. As I understand it, those who cleared JRF level are eligible for Rs. 16,000 p.m. CSIR or UGC research fellowship for 2 years initially followed by a few additional years (max. 3) at Rs. 18,000 subject to some conditions; and are also eligible for Lecturer-ship. JRF is the higher bar; LS (Lecturer-ship) is below it.

"Acharya Nagarjuna University is situated between the cities of Vijayawada and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh on Calcutta and Chennai National Highway (NH-5).", http://www.nagarjunauniversity.ac.in/location.asp. That seems to imply that it is a tier-2 city or semi-urban university. In my humble opinion, that makes the achievement even more laudable.

The interesting point for me is that the article mentions that ANU has, with the assistance of UGC, provided free coaching classes for the NET exam since 2005. That may have been an important contributory factor for the wonderful results. Perhaps other semi-urban/rural universities could emulate ANU in this regard.

It would be interesting to know the break up of NET results streams wise. http://csirhrdg.res.in/netresultjune2012.pdf gives the results but without any break up stream wise  - I mean CS&IT, Physics, Maths, etc. http://csirhrdg.res.in/ gives general info. about the CSIR-UGC NET exam but I could not find links to streams wise break up. An interesting link is the information bulletin for the coming Dec. 2012 Joint CSIR-UGC NET exam: http://csirhrdg.res.in/ibnetdec12.pdf

I did some quick summing-up of the numbers to get a feel of how many cleared it. To facilitate the summing up I copied the data into an Excel sheet.

Note: A result row has a maximum 10 pairs of roll no.-rank entries/columns.

Quote from result pdf document "1. Junior Research Fellowship(JRF-NET):The candidates whose roll numbers are listed below have qualified in the test for JRF-NET. These candidates are also eligible for Lectureship-NET subject to eligibility criteria of UGC/Universities/ Institutes."

The number count:
(I) JRF(NET)CSIR:-
[(37 + 49 + 33)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 1 rank-columns  = 1191

(II) JRF(NET)UGC:-
[(11 + 49 + 49 + 21)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 0 rank-columns = 1300

Quote from result pdf document "2.Lectureship(NET):- The following candidates have qualified the eligibility test for Lectureship-NET. The candidates qualifying for Lectureship-NET will be eligible for recruitment as lecturer as well as for JRF-ship in a Scheme/Project, if otherwise suitable as per the eligibility criteria of that Scheme/Project. However, they will not be eligible for Regular JRF-NET Fellowship. They will be eligible to pursue Ph.D program with or without any fellowship other than JRF-NET."

The number count:

[(21 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 49 + 12)  rows * 10 rank-columns]  + 4 rank-columns  = 3274

To summarize: 2491 candidates passed JRF and 3274 candidates passed LS (Lecturer-ship).

So ANU's count of 4 JRF seems to indicate that it is not really in the top bracket. Therefore the article's statement that ANU "topped the country in UGC-JRF-NET" results seems to be quite a stretch :). Nonetheless 142 applicants qualifying for lecturership seems to be quite an achievement and ANU may have topped the results country-wide from this numbers-count point of view.

Another point, important from CS/IT perspective, is that I was told that, at least for CS&IT stream (Computer Science & Information Technology), this NET exam pattern has been changed to more of an objective test type recently (perhaps from last December) and so is somewhat less difficult to clear as compared to previous years.

Suggestion of Separate Tracks for Teaching and Research by US Academics

Last updated on: 2nd October 2012

Is it time to have two separate tracks for teaching and research in academia (higher education)?

It seems that some faculty in the USA are talking about separation of teaching and research:

1) A tech. view from Georgia Tech., one of the top US research universities in science and technology here: http://www.gatech.edu/vision/big-ideas/separate-faculty-tracks-for-teaching-research.

2) A humanities view from a Columbia University Professor Emeritus, Herbert Gans here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/herbert-gans/separate-research-and-tea_b_844575.html.

I could be wrong but I think that really seems to be the future for higher education in these times of economic uncertainty worldwide. The online education movement may push strongly for this separation.

In the case of CS and IT graduate/post-graduate degrees (e.g. B.Tech., M.Tech.) where, I presume, there is supposed to be substantial focus on teaching software design and development, excellence in teaching these topics should naturally go hand-in-hand with software contributions - if the teacher of these topics does not practice software engineering/development himself/herself how can he/she be an excellent teacher of software engineering? And what better measure of a teacher's excellence in the practice of software development/engineering than his/her software contribution record?

In my references above to software engineering I mean the actual practice of software design and development which includes, as a small part, study of various software development processes. Sometimes the software engineering subject is considered to be limited to study of software development processes which I think is a big mistake. Such limited view of the subject should be called software engineering process(es) and not software engineering.

Open Access Journal Scams

This article from "The Hindu" claims that there are scams involving Open Access Journals. I do not know how accurate its information is: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/on-the-net-a-scam-of-a-most-scholarly-kind/article3939161.ece?homepage=true

The above article concludes, "With no organisation or system in place to check the entry of counterfeits, the onus is on researchers to decide the reliability of what they read, and where to publish their work."

The article indicates that quite a few researchers/authors based in India seem to have published in these alleged "scam" journals. Perhaps their research work loses some/most value as it has got published with journals which are being labeled as scam journals! I think researchers need to be pretty careful about not getting caught up in such scams.

Here are some links regarding such alleged scam journals.
1) http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ (referred by The Hindu article) authored by Associate Prof. Beall, academic librarian, http://scholarlyoa.com/about/, has a list which seems to have over 50 individual allegedly "questionable" journals. http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/ has a list of allegedly "questionable" open access publishers. The list seems to have over 150 names!

Here's Beall's Criteria for Determining Predatory Open-Access Publishers, http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/08/04/criteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers/.

2) http://sust.academia.edu/bikas/Blog/94637/Fake-and-Low-Quality-Computer-Science-Journals

3) http://blog.pokristensson.com/2010/11/04/academic-spam-and-open-access-publishing/comment-page-1/

The Hindu article states that names of academics/researchers are advertised as members of the editorial board without the knowledge of these academics/researchers! That is Identity Theft, pure and simple! This is horrifying.

I think this is where the brand name of the publisher is so vital. For computing areas, top brand names like ACM and IEEE must be having top peer reviewer panel quality, decades of experience in publishing and a sophisticated publishing organization in general. Besides being top quality publishers they certainly seem to be safe publishers as well. Initiatives like ACM Author-izer, http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service, seem to resolve concerns of those authors who want their articles in these publications to be accessible at no charge.

Grad-Student. What does it really mean?

When I served in Indian academia as an honorary staff, honorary faculty and visiting faculty, I had initially got confused with the term grad-student that I saw on some foreign web sites/literature as I thought it may mean a student doing his graduate studies. As far as I know, the term is not commonly used in India. Later I understood that it meant somebody who is doing a PhD or other post graduate studies. (In India, research scholar is the term I have commonly come across to refer to a student doing a PhD). Somebody who is studying to be a graduate is referred to as an under-graduate student.

Today, as I came across the grad-student term in an article, I decided to browse around for it and confirm my understanding of it. That led me to two very interesting web pages.

First I will share, what seems to be, very wise advice from a science department of Yale: Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students by Stephen C. Stearns, Ph.D. It does not shy away from saying the unpleasant truths and seems to have solid tips to succeed in earning a science Ph.D. and become a scientist. While I am a technologist and not a scientist, I get the impression that it is top quality advice from an experienced scientist and academic.

The second part is a very harsh view of grad-student life. But I think there seems to be some truth to it and so is worth reading after reading the above, to get a balanced perspective. The urban dictionary view of the grad-student.

This video is another harsh view, this time from a cartoonist's perspective: The Simpsons - Comments about PhDs and Grad Students. Once again I think it is worth viewing for the balanced perspective.

Tough Times for US Academia; Lessons for India?

I read some articles and saw a youtube video that has startled me. While I knew that US academia had its challenges I had no idea it was so bad.

Read on only if you have the stomach for some pretty depressing stuff about US academia. But please note that the articles referenced below may be biased, so please take them with a few pinches of salt.

The closing of American academia, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html

The article above claims that 2/3rds of US university faculty are part-time and on contract which is not guaranteed for renewal each semester (adjunct faculty)! That seems to indicate that most of such contract faculty receive no benefits or health care.

The author writes, "In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it.". She wonders about her job opportunities as an anthropologist in US academia and whether her education is a way into poverty instead of being a way out of it!

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A brutal video on Humanities academia in the US, So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities: Nine Years Later, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KkluiR5Rns (4 min, 21 sec).

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The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps, http://chronicle.com/article/From-Graduate-School-to/131795/, is an eye-popping account of how some Ph.D. qualified persons in the US are on welfare!

The article mentions a lady with a PhD in medieval history who is an adjunct professor and who is a 43 year old single mother relying on food stamps and Medicaid. She says, "I find it horrifying that someone who stands in front of college classes and teaches is on welfare,".

The article mentions a 51-year old father of two who teaches two courses each semester in the English department in a US university. He is a graduate but not yet a Ph.D who has taught for 14 years in three colleges. "He says he has taught more than two dozen courses in communications, performing arts, and the humanities and he has watched academic positions in these fields nearly disappear with budget cuts."

He is grateful for the dole as without it, his family would be homeless and destitute! The article mentions that he feels he perhaps made a mistake by learning a practical skill that was elitist instead of learning a skill that the economy supports.

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I think the education system in the US is going through a heart-rending period of change which may make it more job-oriented and cost-effective for students. Perhaps countries like India should carefully study what is happening in the US and learn appropriate lessons from it to avoid similar pain in future.