This is such a skewed take. I paid taxes during my PhD in Switzerland and was considered an employee of the university. Any “apprenticeship” in your twenties should enable you to earn enough to afford a decent family life. Passion shouldn’t be the only motivation for academia.
Please remember that PhD stipends are not salaries. They were never intended to be.
In essence, PhDs are paid apprenticeships. You get paid a stipend while you learn the tools of the trade, the trade in this case being research, and how to do it.
That said, there is
From the archives - a letter from Paul Dirac to my dad when he was a PhD scholar at IIT Kanpur (1982). Dad had written to him asking for an article, which he kindly sent all the way from Florida.
#ThrowbackThursdays
The state of academia in some universities in 2023 is that you get ₹300 only for teaching a class as a temporary lecturer, amounting to ₹4800 per month. This, after an MSc with NET or PhD. This, after years of education and hard work. I have no words.
Happy to announce that I have received a DAAD fellowship (Research Stays for University Academics and Scientists) for a short-term visit to the Zentrum Für Astronomie at Heidelberg University this year, where I will be continuing my collaboration with Prof. Bjoern Malte Schaefer.
I often hear people say they never liked physics: they either found it too dull or too difficult. I think loving physics requires a good teacher at school, to begin with. And in UG, one just needs to learn to appreciate the Maxwell's equations. After that, there's no going back.
Since the topic has come up, here are some of my top "failures":
1. Didn't qualify IIT JEE
2. Didn't get into any good college in West Bengal after 12th
3. Dropped out of BSc in the 2nd year and started afresh in a new place - it wasn't working out, academically and otherwise
My cv of failure would be too long lol. And if I were to count every rejection mail I have got since PhD applications, I would need to write a book instead 🥲
What do you do on the days when you feel overwhelmed by how much there is to read and learn and work on in your field, and you somehow don't seem to have the mental capacity for any of it?
The ratio of male to female faculty members in some of the top Indian institutes is sad as well as absurd. Happened to see the list of faculty members in the Physics Department of
@iiserkol
, and the ratio is 31:1. One woman, and 31 men.
By age 30, you should figure out a way to preserve your inner child-like curiosity about the world around you, that has undergone a gradual declination over the years through a competitive and mechanical education system.
Anyone else who sometimes feels like going for another PhD in a field very very different from their current domain because there's so much they have missed on by specialising in a very specific area?
No? Just me? Okay never mind 🥲
Hello from sunny Heidelberg ☀️
I am now actively looking for assistant professor positions in Physics in Indian universities and institutes, and would appreciate some heads up about positions if you have any. My specialisation is in theoretical cosmology/astrophysics.
The saying that people don't get into academia for money has been normalised to the extent that it's been accepted as a universal truth: one needs to be so passionate about academics that they shouldn't care about a high standard of living. But why? And for how long?
I am looking for science-based media collaborations.
A bit about myself: I have a PhD in Physics, specialising in Cosmology and Astrophysics, with almost eight-year of research career behind me. Additionally, I am also a social media content creator who writes about cinema. ++
Happy new year everyone 💐 Here's remembering Satyendra Nath Bose on his 130th birthday with a stamp issued in his honour on his birth centenary in 1994.
Bangalore bars need to make new playlists beyond 2010s music. I'm so done with Cheap Thrills, Shape of You and Girls Like You. You'd be sitting there drinking and having a déjà vu of mistakes you made 6 years ago, just because of the music.
Kudos to Atharv from IITK for speaking about this mental harassment publicly. So many students in elite institutions must be suffering in silence, and it’s heartbreaking that the authorities often turn a deaf ear. You shouldn’t be a supervisor if you don’t have empathy. Period.
Prof. David Tong at
@ictstifr
yesterday in a room packed with young audiences. He talked about quark confinement, vacuum fluctuations and the Navier-Stokes equation, and the possibility of addressing these things with similar toolkits.
I'm a theoretical physicist in a film: I scribble incoherent math on the blackboard, I have zero fashion sense, my hair is in a permanent state of dishevel and I accidentally create a portal to another dimension by writing some new kind of black hole metric on the wall.
I'm a chemist in a film: No matter my area of expertise, I will make brightly colored solutions. If I'm not the villain, I'm the anti-hero. Before credits, I will sequence some alien genome and orchestrate a catastrophic explosion. AT THE SAME TIME. In a tank top.
@mnwsth
If we continue being satisfied with being in the top 1% with 37k + hra for 50-70 hrs per week of work, then that’s how it is going to be in India for a long time to come.
My cv of failure would be too long lol. And if I were to count every rejection mail I have got since PhD applications, I would need to write a book instead 🥲
In big cities like Bangalore, even if someone you know is visiting, you don't have to meet them because.. traffic and distance. If you're in Europe and a friend visits, they expect you to come and see them in a different country because it's probably just an hour away.
It's going to be a busy two months, with the Astronomical Society of India Meet happening here at IISc, and I am also travelling to give seminar talks at three IITs subsequently :) Can be a bit tiring but very much looking forward.
Keeping unnecessary lines commented out in LaTeX instead of deleting them is the equivalent of storing smartphone boxes instead of throwing them out, thinking that you might need them at some point in life.
Thinking that you'd only do science when you chose to do science is so inaccurate because you also need to be a good writer (for papers), speaker (for talks), artist/graphic designer (for slides/posters), and so on. We often don't acknowledge enough the soft skills we pick up.
Hello to all the new people here today :)
Quick intro about me: I am on Twitter to ramble about academia, and to get reminded each day how beautiful the world of science is. I'm occasionally funny, sometimes confused and a lot of the times frustrated. Hope you enjoy my company.
So many old friends who aren't in regular contact anymore but when you get to know how far they have come in life and doing so great in their career, academic or otherwise, it fills your heart with joy and pride. It's a very warm feeling :')
Shoutout to Masters students whose concise and lucidly written theses often help us researchers find a convenient starting point for reading about some topic for the first time. Even if you are not publishing at this stage, you are doing useful work. Be proud.
The twinkle in their eyes and the sheer enthusiasm with which people talk about their research (even if it's beyond my understanding) is one of the things I live for.
Super excited to dive in to this new addition to my collection. Nothing more fulfilling than going back to the fundamentals from time to time.
@DD_Baumann
As someone who hasn't had any exposure to machine learning techniques so far and is very curious about it, I came across the Machine Learning for Physics and Astronomy course by
@AstroVivi
et al., freely available online. It's looks quite fun so far. Will keep you updated.
It was a very pleasant couple of days at Palakkad. The permanent IIT campus is still under construction, and is going to be surrounded by a lot of natural beauty. The faculty members extended a warm hospitality. Special thanks to Prof. Projjwal Banerjee for hosting me.
One of the best things about being in academia is how you get a kick from learning the simplest of techniques, even if it's just figuring out how to make a certain kind of plot in Mathematica.
4. Appeared for NET exam twice, didn't clear
5. Got tons of rejection emails for PhD applications abroad
6. Got papers rejected by journals multiple times
7. Got a few postdoc rejections before I made it to IISc
8. Not relevant anymore but scored 30% in maths in school once
I have been daily writing "を" for almost 60 years and "h ba" for almost 40 years, but I never realized this!
From today, it will never be as before when I write "を."
What I feel the most from
@skdh
's new video about the downside of academia is that one has to yield to a nomadic lifestyle, that too indefinitely, hopping from one postdoc to another. In my early 20s, that's the life I craved for. Now I want to have a house of my own and a cat.
Academics are expected to be fast learners, but sometimes we pressurise ourselves to learn things too fast, in the hope of getting quick outputs. The publishing race makes us forget that one reason that we got into research in the first place, is that we believed in patience.
Spent the last couple of days with some calculations for a friend's research paper in photonics, a topic which I haven't studied beyond my Masters. It was a rewarding experience that reminded me that academics are capable of donning many hats. Maybe we don't appreciate it enough.
Super-psyched to be delivering my first outreach talk ever at the Open Day this Saturday. Hop in if you're around, and for a plethora of events at the institute in general. Also happy belated National Science Day to everyone! 🥰
Post a picture of some landscape from a place where you’ve been, where the main requirement is that you NOT appear in it. Just a picture, no description.
We at
@iiscbangalore
are carrying out the arrangements for the Astronomical Society of India Meet on full swing!
Looking forward to a very vibrant atmosphere in the next few days.
@asipoec
Firstly if you're applying to the US/Canada/UK, prepare well for the English language tests. Often you also have to arrange for your own scholarships. That's not so much the case for European countries where the PhD positions come with the salary. (1/n)
@cosmobasu
Could you please share your path towards doing a PhD abroad? What could be the things one should keep in mind while applying? I think that would be helpful for young PhD aspirants like me.
If you're an Indian who has studied/worked abroad you must have heard your peers talk about how they took a break after high school or UG and went for volunteer work in a foreign country. As a young student few years ago, it was a very alien concept to me. (1/n)
Would highly recommend anybody having a career in the education sector to watch The Teachers' Lounge. So compelling and unsettling, with a very unpredictable turn of events. (My second German-language film this month, and both so good.)
So you want to tell me that in 3 Body Problem, the aliens don't arrive until 400 years and everyone is panicking, and irl we're already having an unprecedented rise in temperatures and water shortages and people are going about their business like the planet isn't ending.
With eminent cosmologists Rashid Sunyaev and Richard Bond, on this day four years ago, at ICTS Bengaluru. Always inspiring to interact with the people who shaped our current understanding of Cosmology.
Interestingly, when women do get recruited (either at faculty, postdoc or PhD student level), I have heard men say that it's because females get preferred due to lack of representation. If that's true, then where is the representation? Quite funny actually.
The ratio of male to female faculty members in some of the top Indian institutes is sad as well as absurd. Happened to see the list of faculty members in the Physics Department of
@iiserkol
, and the ratio is 31:1. One woman, and 31 men.
Looking forward to attending this talk today at
@ictstifr
. David Tong's lecture notes have played a huge part in whatever understanding of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics I have today.
Calling all the science enthusiasts in Bengaluru! Brace yourselves for an unforgettable experience as you get the chance to interact with none other than the legendary theoretical physicist David Tong LIVE!
20 Dec @ 4 PM
@ictstifr
campus
Register now
Going back to the office after a month tomorrow. Have been working from my hometown in July, and missed my workplace. Sometimes it's good to change places so that you appreciate better what you have.
I don't understand why some universities and institutes still require you to send your application form and documents by post after submitting them online. Not the digital India we envisioned?
A new low in advertisements
@fiitjee
. You are posting the picture of a child saying that she performed badly because she left your institute! I have blurred the picture because I don't believe in this disgusting way of claiming your superiority by belittling a girl child.
In early twentieth century, physics was undergoing its greatest revolution. The top universities of Europe were at the frontiers.
But a physicist far away from the action came up with one of the biggest breakthroughs.
My article on hundred years of Bose’s famous discovery of
In Europe people casually converse about linguistic diversity. Even my Iranian friends and I had fun comparing Persian and Urdu/Bengali words. If only people would do this in India, where they are rather interested in establishing the superiority of one language over another.
Is signing off with "Best" an academic thing only? I haven't seen non-academics do it 😂
I picked it up from profs during my PhD and have stuck to it since.
I love brown people eye-contacting in foreign lands. No idea where the other person is from, but just a slight eye contact that says "yo brown energy" 🤙🏽