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...

There is no doubt that we have limited time. We need to allocate this time to numerous activities according to our own life goals and preferences. What are those activities? I have categorised them into four major heads: Work, Health, Social Life and Happiness. Work This consists of the tasks that is expected while fulfilling professional duties. For professors, it can be activities such teaching, doing research, admin duties and many others. Health  The activities to keep yourself healthy such as enough sleep , good food and  daily exercising. Here, I am  concerned with physical health only. Mental health is assumed to be in shape if one is keeping track of  fourth head "Happiness" and also I am ignoring exceptional cases for simplicity. Social Life Giving required time to family , friends and society, in that order. It is crucial to give time not only to family but also to friends and society in general. Happiness One may extract happiness from va...

India could have won the match easily with the kind of form they were in. But they failed in this crucial match. I am not here to do a post-match analysis like a pseudo-expert on cricket (Most Indian Spectators are. I was like them too, not long ago.), rather I am here with a different viewpoint on this loss. It is very easy to criticise cricketers but can we learn from this event? What did India lack ? 1. Luck: Yes, it is true that luck didn't favour. The playing conditions in first 45 minutes of overcast conditions in England is harsh for batsmen. Had Virat Kohli been given not out, New-zealand might have reviewed it and their review could have turned down as it was umpire's call. Who could have imagined a direct hit from Martin Guptill to run out Dhoni. And you can find few more instances like these. Can we blame luck for loss? No. It can never be an excuse as no team has control over it. 2. Preparedness for worst cases:  They were not prepared to face such a s...

Time is precious, it flies very fast. We realize it only when we are about to fail or we have just failed to achieve something really important. On other occasions, we remain ignorant of value of time. Remember, we have enough time for major tasks and we need prioritization for that.Once you learn that, no one can stop you to become the person you want to be.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

There are two types of people Who work only when there is a lot of pressure on them. They need to be pushed through deadline, appraisal, assessment, training etc. Who are self motivated. They work better if they have freedom. We can belong to any of the above categories. Actually, we belong to both depending upon the task. Let us take the example of Virat Kohli, He might need a push in bowling. Does he need any push in batting? obviously not. In my opinion, if he is pushed for batting, his performance might decrease. In other words, he needs freedom in batting. In General, the freedom could be in setting your deadline, choosing the style of working , identifying the set of tasks to reach the goal  etc. Do you need full freedom? No! If given full freedom you might not perform at all.Let me take my own example, In semester vacations, my productivity is lower than normal semester days.I generally start my vacation with full enthusiasm with some ambitious goals.For first fe...