A PhD Post

Mentorship is a two-way process, where you shape your adviser as he shapes you. I am living proof of that. The last few weeks have been the turning point of my PhD. For those of you who do not know, I am at the fag end of my second year in the PhD program. This is when you are done with your coursework, and are beginning to think of some nice ideas, one of which could potentially turn into a dissertation. In my field of research, we usually do two kinds of studies- qualitative and quantitative. There is a third kind, the mixed-methods approach, where you mix both qualitative and quantitative data to validate each other. Quantitative studies heavily rely on data analyzed through statistics and number crunching, while qualitative studies rely on making meaning of the experiences of people through observations, interviews, focus group discussions, ethnography studies, et cetera. One approach is not necessarily better than the other, and you need to understand both methods in order to address a research question well.

            My research group is heavy on quantitative analysis. There are a couple of reasons for that. Your sample size can be way larger in a quantitative data set (tens of thousands sometimes), the sophistication of the statistical software can make you run analyses in less time, and overall, your rate of publication is higher when you do quantitative work. Clearly, the numbers speak for themselves, and that is why my group has always relied on quantitative dissertations.

            I was expected to do a quantitative dissertation from day one. My adviser is a hard taskmaster and makes you takes every possible course on methodology. It is hard, doing all that work, and I have seen myself screaming through semesters when I was taking four methods courses at a time. In graduate school, taking four courses per semester is a challenge; you can imagine what taking four methods courses would be like. I have taken the entire 3-series qualitative coursework, 5-series quantitative coursework, and various other courses related to item response theory, multilevel modeling, and so on. I have had to learn using Stata, SPSS, Genova, NVivo, and Atlas Ti from scratch. Anyway, I ended up taking a lot of these quant courses, and realized my heart was not really in there. I could run regression models and stuff, I could learn to live with that, but not love that. On the other hand, I took the qualitative courses and loved them.

            The first time my adviser learned about my newfound love for qualitative analysis, he asked me to change advisers. Clearly this is what none of his students had done before, and he was skeptical. I would be crazy to change advisers at this stage, I love this research group, so I assured him that I would do a quantitative dissertation. We were collecting a lot of qualitative data for an NIH funded study, and with my background in the biosciences and public health, I found myself attracted to that data. I would randomly do some preliminary analysis, while still looking for a quantitative research idea. This went on for a few more months. My adviser was supposed to go to an annual conference in California, a big one for sure, and I asked him if I could come. He said no, and then gave it a thought and asked me what I would do there. I said I had done some preliminary analysis and could present it to him, so that he could decide. I told him that it was qualitative data analysis. I just wanted to attend the conference and visit California, hoping to make some contacts there. I did not hope for anymore.

            The adviser gave me an evening, and asked me to present my data to him the next morning. I had an evening, which is nothing when you have to present your findings. People spend days preparing their presentations. He said that I could come with him if I could impress him. I spent that evening putting some more thought and rationale into my data analysis, and presented it to him next morning sharp at 10 am. He had some thoughts, he asked some questions, and told me to do some more. He was about to leave when I asked him if I could come to California. He told me I am on board.

            I was thrilled. I spent more time into this analysis, aware that I will have to soon go back to my quantitative dissertation idea. I kept working hard at this and showing him my analysis, knowing that I had a very limited amount of time with this dataset. I still did not have a dissertation idea.

            About 2 weeks ago, my adviser approved of me doing either a wholly qualitative dissertation, or a mixed-method dissertation. He told me that I have changed his opinion about what his graduate students’ dissertation profile should look like, replete with quantitative data analysis. He reminded me of the risks I am taking being the first one in his team to do qualitative work. This has been the single most pivotal moment in my PhD career. From the day when he asked me to change advisers because I liked qualitative work to this day when he said I will be the first one in his team to do something new, I have come a long way from where I was. I never really had any expectation of him changing his mind. However, I kept doing something I am good at, and things unfolded for me serendipitously.

            I have secured a place in the California conference. I have finally decided on my dissertation topic, after 6 months of banging my head against the wall. Most importantly, I have realized that although there is a prescribed route to success that everyone before me has followed, there is also value in determining my own way based on my interests without taking the road stalwarts have taken before me. I will carve out my own niche, doing something my group has never done before. It may or may not be kick ass, like Eric Cartman would say. However, that for me is the true essence of education- authenticity, uniqueness, and doing something different with all my love.

sunshine

The World of Secrets

I don’t understand much of technology, but an innovative idea of art always excites me. I don’t understand why I should trade my normal flip phone for an iphone when all I need a phone is for talking. That is how techgnorant I am. However I get very excited when I come across a blog that is different,or a particular way something is sketched, or discover a certain book written differently. When I discovered Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, I was amazed at the way the book was conceptualized. Last week something similar happened. I discovered a website called postsecret dot com. Ever since, I have been hooked to it. As I read all of it, I wondered why I did not think of such an idea before. It is so very simple, yet so empowering.

Ever felt you are surrounded with secrets that haunt you? Secrets that you think no one should know, yet you are eager to share? Secrets of a hurtful childhood? Memories of the first kiss? Maybe the first time you did something mean to someone? Broke a flower vase? Harassed the neighbors? Stole something for fun? Did something otherwise considered taboo? Had voices in your head tell you something inappropriate? Wanted to say to your scatterbrained teacher what you thought of her? You get the point, right?

The idea is simple. Write down your secret in a postcard. Decorate it the way you want it to. Mail it to an address in Maryland, and it will get published. While you remain anonymous, your secret is out there for the world to read. The idea thrilled me. I made a mental note and came up with so many secrets I would want to share anonymously. Why do I hate this and this. Why do I like such and such thing. What do I think of you. What I don’t think of you. It’s so liberating and empowering, writing down your secret out in the open for you to read, and remain anonymous while the world reads it. It seems they have a couple of books published with people’s secrets in them. I immediately checked the book catalog at the library and got hold of their first book. It was more of a pictorial book with picture postcards and their secrets published. I could not put down the book till I finished it, homework and assignments be darned. I had finished the book in one evening. Ever since, I have been sniffing to get my hand on the other books.

I love that it is something so simple, yet so empowering and healing. I cannot tell about you, but I am definitely going to have fun reading others secrets. And no, I am still not telling you my secrets. But for the fact that I love listening to cheesy double entendre Bhojpuri songs while no one is looking J

www.postsecret.com

sunshine

Scribble Scrabble

I am a huge supporter of the concept of birthday gifts. I love the idea of personally choosing something for someone knowing his/her tastes, wrapping it all up in colorful paper, and then watching the birthday person excitedly ripping open the box to discover the gift. Why others, I often give myself a birthday gift. For me, gifts are more utilitarian than anything else. So I asked myself what I wanted this year. Soft toys, I was too old for while clothes, not unless I was shifting to a place with a bigger closet. Cosmetics don’t fascinate me and books, I have plenty. However, this year, I gifted myself the perfect thing I have been looking for a while now.

The day before my birthday, I got myself a pristine white board, 4ft by 3 ft in dimension with an eraser and 5 different colors of marker pens. It was a great deal that was bought home amidst much fanfare, and soon it was attached to the wall in my bedroom. Ever since that day I have been happily scribbling on the walls. I make grocery lists, I make lists of the things I love and the things I hate, lists of movies I have seen and the movies I want to see. Any random thought that crosses my mind is on the board before I forget it. What more, I now strategize situations by drawing a flowchart. It is amazing how problem solving takes a different dimension once you have written it all out in front of you. At home, I am often seen humming to myself and happily scribbling ideas on the board. Under different circumstances, I would have liked to acknowledge that the ideas scribbled on the board puts me on the same pedestal of great scientists like Einstein and Newton, whose home walls were probably scribbled with complex mathematical equations, integration squiggles, and geometric diagrams. But my board endures simpler things like grocery lists and the list of bills I need to pay by the end of the month.

It doesn’t matter whether you write complex equations or make grocery lists on the board. It doesn’t matter whether you want to portray yourself as a great scientist in the making, or simply a confused person with scrambled up thoughts on the board. Just the concept of having a space to scribble uninhibitedly without being noticed or judged feels amazing. Do try it !

sunshine

Barcodes

I was thinking the other day that what if people had barcodes on their feet? Technology has advanced so much that it is difficult to believe people haven’t already considered this a possibility. Wouldn’t it be so very easy if everyone had barcodes on their feet? That way one could keep track of wherever one went, because most places would have these electronic scanners that would scan people as and when they entered and left someplace. This way one would leave electronic footprints behind, and using a secure password, one could find out where one was at such and such date. That will save so much trouble remembering when did you go to get your last dental checkup, when did you get that milk from the grocery store that turned sour before its expiry date, or when had you gone to visit your ex-girlfriend last in the year 1999. The information would be confidential, and no one but you would have access to it. Of course authorities like the cops could get hold of such information if they had permission to do so. Certainly that would make the job of tracing down criminals and suspects much easier. At the end of the day, if you are in the habit of maintaining a diary, you could connect yourselves to a device and scan the chip to keep a record of the places you went to. This way you could also trace the places you have been to when you visited Montana in 2005, the number of miles that you have jogged since January this year, and in general join the dots and create a map of your footprints on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Mothers will no longer have to worry about their babies getting lost, and it would help healthcare systems provide better service, knowing exactly when and for what reason you went to the doctor. And all it would take is a simple barcode on your feet.

What do you think?

sunshine

Can You "SIT" Through This?

I was half listening to the lecture, half lost in my thoughts during the 8 AM class this morning. This isn’t unusual, since the prospect of sitting through a 90 minute class straight is totally unacceptable to me. The seating arrangement was in the form of a long rectangle with one of its short sides chopped off for the instructor to stand, while I sat closest to him. I was bored to death, feigning interest, though my mind had wandered off to the different theories I come up with. Today, I didn’t come up with a unique hypothesis, but certainly an interesting research question.

What makes people decide to sit where they choose to sit?

If there was a huge hall full of empty chairs such that the number of chairs was greater than the number of people in the room, and if each person was free to independently decide his coordinates, what would cause a particular person to choose where he chooses to sit?

I myself have attended classes of different sizes and seating arrangements. There is this standard arrangement where the teacher is at one end of the room and there are rows of seats in front, so that if you were sleepy or bored, you could always choose the last row for a short nap. And then there was this class I was sitting in where three sides of the room has seating arrangements, the fourth side for the instructor, while the rest of the room was a long strip of empty floor space good enough for a cricket pitch. And then there were rooms more like stadiums and cinema halls where you climbed up and down the stairs to have the seat of your choice.

Keeping all the classroom seating designs in mind, what induces people to opt for certain seats? If it is a small class and you needed a recommendation letter from the professor at the end of the semester, you perhaps chose to sit in the front row, left, right, or center. Even if the course didn’t interest you, you pretended as if it was the second best thing that happened to you after that apple fell on Newton’s head and gave you several extra chapters and formula to learn from the physics text book. If you didn’t care about the recommendation letter, you probably chose to sit in some dimly lit corner of the room, trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible. If it was a huge class with a gallery seating arrangement, you would probably choose to sit at the end in order to see the teacher better, precisely the reason why balcony seats in the cinema hall are more expensive than the rear stall ones. If you have the habit of dangling your legs to ensure proper blood flow to the hind limbs, the first bench is never a good idea. If you had a large ass, the side seats may not be a good idea (God, why am I reminded of someone called Eric Cartman… aaayyeeee !). 

Having said that, if you had a large classroom and observed where people sat in each class, I wonder what the results would look like. Some would always sit in the front while some would always sit at the back. Some would always alternate, left, right, center, front, back, doesn’t matter. Some would not care about the coordinates as much as they would care for their friends. Some would always be proximal to a certain group of people while some would always be at the maximum possible distance from a certain group of people. Some would be undecided and take the first available seat. Some would avoid being close to the other professors in the room who have come to attend the seminar, while some would make it a point to always sit closest to their adviser. Students with love interests are expected to sit close to each other. Students who take lots of notes will usually choose that empty corner to get that extra space, and definitely the front one to see and hear properly. People who wanted some extra attention will usually sit in the front while people like me who couldn’t care less would try to find some godforsaken corner. If it is a class of hundreds, one would prefer to be as close to the EXIT sign as possible. Some people have a favorite seat, a favorite nook or corner where they sit class after class, year after year. They squirm and get uncomfortable if they find someone else sitting in their favorite place (If it is a man called Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, he will make sure his favorite seat is vacated before the class can even start). Some people are like extra-terrestrial bodies that wander, though not aimlessly, but with a formula not yet known to physicists. If you had a bird eye view of a square classroom, I usually prefer to sit in the geometrical center. It gives me a sense of symmetry, the walls being equidistant from my left, right, and frontal vision.

If there was a study for a year (the class being unaware of it) where some crazy theory proponent like me observed and recorded peoples preferences for seats, would there emerge a specific pattern out of it? If the sample size was large enough, would the result fall safely within a confidence interval? Will the seating pattern be in clusters, scattered, linearly, or otherwise? Would there be confounders and effect modifiers? Who knows how it works. Probably when you enter a large room, a fluorescent lighted signal leaves your brain to your muscles directing where it should move, unless there are certain determining factors like friends, state of interest or boredom, etc., that predetermines a location. If we were to develop a conceptual model on seating, what factors would be involved? Neurocognition? Motor coordination? Evolutionary stable strategy? Social learned behavior? Purely instinct and/or reflex? Networking intentions? A combination of physiological and social factors? I myself have attended a class with a handsome doctor in it when I would come late and strategically position myself so as to be able to see him the best, yet be as unobtrusive as possible. Yeah, even budding scientists have hormones.

I applaud your patience if you are still reading this. After all, it is an age old rant of scientists that people do not understand or appreciate their concepts and ideas. You see, an idea, a random thought is all that it takes, and though the theories you hypothesize may not earn you Nobel prizes, it can certainly transport you to wonderland and see you through 8 AM classes or concepts otherwise considered boring.

sunshine

Bonding.

Over a cuppa coffee (not with KJo though), I thought-
What chemistry had biochemistry brought into my life? Mugging up the equations and formulae, being able to recognize and draw the structure of every amino acid, as if it would help me make better shrimps. The prof expected me to eat biochemistry, sleep biochemistry, dream biochemistry, and to permanently sleep with the text book as a pillow. Even if I did that, I would never bring myself to like biochemistry. I felt no bonding with it.

Wait, what did I say? Bonding? B-O-N-D-I-N-G? Carbon bonding? Nitrogen bonding? Oxygen bonding? Valence states? Bonding? Bonding? Thinking of bonding over a cup of coffee?

B
O
N
D
I
N
G
?????????
Paper and pen. Here I go. Scribble scribble. Scratch scratch head. God, I felt like a scientist at work.

B
O
N

D
I
N
G
Here I go-

sunshine.

If Blogging Were A Profession.

Ever wondered what if blogging were a profession? What if blogging was something we did 40 hours a week to earn money, and not something we did to unwind at the end of a long day? I hear that some people are professional bloggeres and make good money out of it. And then there is Adsense too. But I don't mean all that. What if in a party, there were people introducing themselves to each other in answer to “What do you do?”, saying, I am a doctor, I am a journalist, I am an engineer, and I am a blogger? After all, there were no biotechnologists, computer scientists, epidemiologists, graphic designers, or choreographers once upon a time. And then there would be further introductions about the educational backgrounds. So perhaps when the engineer came from Delhi (just randomly), the doctor from a medical school in Bangalore, the journalist from Pune, the blogger too would identify as an alumna of the prestigious Indian Institute of Blogging Sciences, the first of its kid in South Asia. While engineers had specializations in electrical, computer, mechanical, and so on, and management students specialized in finance, marketing, or HR, bloggers could specialize in social blogs, media blogs, review blogs, literary blogs, picture blogs, blogs on politics, food blogs, blogs on activism, sports, child rearing, and so on.

What if there were blogging companies, sometimes multinational, that hired bloggers fresh out of blogging school? These freshers perhaps got a four year undergraduate degree in Blogging Sciences (BBSc) or a masters level degree (MBSc). Of course they could have an option to pursue higher studies in any of the prestigious American schools (or for that matter, anywhere in the world) that had an entire department, “Department of Blogging Sciences and Research” to it. There could be new concepts like macroblogging and microblogging. Of course there would be general GRE, TOEFL, and Subject GRE (depending on what you wanted to specialize in).

In the job sector, one had the freedom to blog about what one was good at. They would help the companies that hired them earn revenue in some way. They had a choice of working in a cubicle in the office with the computer, or going outdoors to write about things (or maybe a combination of both). They had certain rights and as employees, were entitled to certain allowances and emoluments. Their employers could get them transferred to other blogging projects, or even other cities or countries. And blogging as a profession wouldn't just be an extension of media or journalism. There would be new concepts and different dimensions to it. Blog researchers and professors could take a sabbatical and go visit other countries. Like doctors saved lives (and some looted their patients) and engineers made machines to help people save time they don't know what they are gonna do with and managers skilfully transferred their work to the lower rung and marketing professionals made people buy products they could do without and government officials spent all day drinking gallons of chai and chatting and biotech researchers fiddled around all day with genes, inserting the gene of a fish into that of a lizard to see if it could swim better, (no offense meant), bloggers too could have some kind of contribution to the society. After all, the concept behind the establishment of most professions in the society lies in creating a demand among people and then meeting the demand created with a steady supply.

And then there would be such and such ads in the matrimonial columns of the newspaper- “Alliance wanted for tall, fair, handsome Brahmin Blogger (IIBS), only son, own house, working with an MNC in Bangalore, A+, earning 10lac pa, wanted fair, slim, convent educated girl (preferably blogger)”. Mothers could work from home, since it mostly requires a computer and creativity. 

And then the Oxford English Dictionary could have new words added to it, like blogomania (madness for blogging), blogophobic (someone who is scared of blogs), blogstipation (temporary or permanent inability to relate to or write blogs), blogosophy (like philosophy), blogoholic, gynoblogger (a female blogger), a misoblogist (hater of blogs or bloggers) and an anthropoblogist (one who blogged about humankind), perhaps an ornithoblogger (blogger of birds) and a sauroblogger (blogger of reptiles). Of course omnibloggers like me could write about anything under the sun. And with the evolution of the new language, who knows, we could find some innovative swear words related to blogs or bloggers. Come to think of it, if excreta or the technical act of love making can be converted into swear words, then why not this?

And then, two gentlemen newly introduced to each other would converse something along these lines.

Hi, I am a medical student of AIIMS.

Hi, I am a blogging sciences student from IIBS.

Oh wow, that's cool. I took the entrance test for that institute four years ago, but couldn't go beyond the prelims.

I too failed to clear the AIIMS entrance test. Luckily, I made it here.

So what would you want to do next?

Oh, there were campus interviews last month. I got a job in the R&D section of Blogtor & Gamble.

sunshine.