Jai Kamal's Blog : Work in Progress

I  joined PhD program in June 2017, around two and a half years ago. I have learned  many things (both academic and non-academic) during this period. The focus of this article is to highlight some major academic learnings. Discipline and Consistency  Research is a mix of interesting and mundane tasks. Unfortunately, a lot more mundane tasks than interesting ones. Who will not love to finish interesting work ? The problem arises when you meet a roadblock of mundane tasks. To finish them, you need discipline. You will have to put your heart aside and try to finish tasks at hand like a duty. Consistency can outperform intensity when it comes to a long journey like PhD. A typical engineering student mindset suggest to complete things by working intensely in last hours.  At times they think themselves like Dhoni who can finish game in the last overs. But, this strategy doesn't seem to work well when it comes to PhD which is much like a test match. In test ma...

Ram , a 26 years old MBA student at one of the prestigious institutes in India, is known for his academic excellence and decision making skills. He has been a bright student throughout his life and his family has a lot of hope from him. He is lucky to have parents who don’t force their decision on him and he has been taking his own decisions since class 12th. He is proud of his strategy that he takes the best possible choice at every stage. He has ability to find what is best for him as he has very clear preferences and ability to calculate the payoffs from actions. For example, after completing class 12th, he decided to take admissions in B.Tech. and after completing B.Tech. he choose to work rather than going for higher education. After 2 years of work, he decided to pursue MBA. So far he has taken the best possible alternative, according to his preferences, at each stage of his life and he has reaped benefits of this strategy. Now, he is supposed to sort companies in his preference...