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| A lecture hall in IISER Bhopal. Photo: IISER Bhopal |
After a long day of edification at the Indian Strings Meeting in 2016, a group of young scholars wandered out through the rear gate of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, and went for a drink.
As they sat down, in the cold Pune air, amidst muffled music and cigarette smoke, the conversation drifted to all the usual topics – the weather, the news, the Modave school in Belgium. For those who don’t keep up with summer schools in theoretical physics, the Modave school is a yearly event where PhD students and postdoctoral researchers live together in a picturesque village and educate each other about relevant areas in their field...
Somewhere in the ethos of the PhD is the purpose of helping students transition to being scientists. According to these scholars, that isn’t happening. Paradoxically, it seems that some parts of the current system renders them more dependent on their advisors instead of enabling them to pursue independent scholarship. This isn’t easily fixable: the nature of power in academia is a complicated tangle of thread, and unraveling one soon requires you to take a scissor to the whole thing.
Like light, PhD students are a duality: exhibiting the properties of both student and researcher. This makes them a challenging subject. But unlike light, we can always just ask PhD students what they think about all this. Under the right circumstances, they might just tell us.
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Source: The Wire
