Financial risk in attending international conferences

Let us look at the cost of attending an international conference by a faculty working at one of the public academic institutes in India. You will see the point I am trying to make about the financial risk at the end of the post.

Estimate

Some assumptions need to be made to get an average picture of the numbers involved. If you have already attended international conferences, you will see that the numbers I use are quite OK. Let the conference be in USA (Europe is halfway, the stronger currency and higher expences might just even out).

Air ticket will be economy class and of reimbursible (open) category. There is now a rule for government employees that international ticketing shall be only by approved travel agents such as Balmer and Lawrie. With a 3-5 month advance booking, it comes to around Rs. 65,000.

The registration fees for a four day conference could be anywhere above $600 ($=USD). There is usually a 10% higher price to be paid if the fee is to be paid on-spot. It makes sense to pay in the last minute because of a particular government rule. If the institute pays for the registration fees and you don't make it to the conference for whatever reason, you will have to return it to the institute fully. But the conference organizers do not often return much or even happily once you have already paid. The registration fees comes to around Rs. 30,000.

The accommodation in an ordinary hotel abroad could be taken as 100 dollars per day. Taking possible hidden taxes, strange check-out timings and the dates you could get the lower fare into account, we could round this off to Rs. 20,000.

On the day of arrival and departure, one may need a taxi from the airport to the hotel. If you need to commute between the conference venue and the hotel you could afford, then the public transportation cost also adds up. Take this expense to be around Rs. 6,000.

What about food? Conferences abroad, particularly those with just $600 registration fee will usually not feed you. Even if you are willing to live off in-expensive fast food, you should be lucky to have one in the vicinity of the conference venue. 30 dollars for the whole day is reasonable. That comes to Rs. 6000 for the whole trip.

Visa fees, travel insurance will cost you another Rs. 10,000.

Now when you add all these numbers, the figure you get is Rs. 137,000.


Funding and Planning

Getting someone to pay this kind of money to let you attend a conference is not so easy.

Some academic institutes (eg., see the last paragraph of this page for example) fund partially towards one trip every 3 years. Such blanket supports are nice but are also usually subject to several conditions (publication track record, oral/poster, bonds etc.,).

Several govt and private trusts also provide funds. Have a look at the announcements of one of the government agencies on travel support to attend international conferences. You can see that the probability of getting funded isn't much and the periodicity of such decisions also calls for adequate planning on the applicant's side.

Visa procedure, in view of the current global scenario, takes time. The appointment for a personal interview alone may need a two month lead time. Applications usually need the ticket and accommodation to be booked in advance. So that calls for spending a big amount well before one actually gets to know if the funding will come through completely and in time.


Risk

If you look at the final amount we arrived at above, it comes to six months of take home salary of a typical (young) faculty in any of the public academic institutes in India. The rise in fuel costs, taxes, the inflation and the stagnant salaries of faculty won't change this ratio so soon.

The risks are the following:

• You plan, attend the conference and come back but the full funding is not available.
• You pay for the ticket and accommodation but your visa is rejected or delayed.
• You have everything ready but a last minute mishap prevents you from actually attending the conference. Missing a flight, falling ill, accident, bereavement in family, what not.

The financial risk is the following: In the above situations, can the person absorb the cost? Does a faculty have six months of her take home salary in reserve that can disappear and still not hurt?

Some institutes have measures to insulate their faculty against fears of such financial disasters. Contingency grants of industrial consultancy projects, personal contingency funds are some of the instruments available. Nice colleagues with good funding and understanding higher-ups will be saving grace. I wonder if there is some insurance for the whole excercise.

Selection and the implication

I remember from the Organizational Behaviour course that I attended long back, a discussion around the inherent limitations of any screening examination. It is one of those many things I remember from the wonderful lectures of Prof. Anantharaman. He was such a nice teacher. I want to blog about this issue now and see how far I can get it right.

It is now a well accepted hypothesis that the mental abilities (as measured, eg., by an IQ test) of a large population follow a normal distribution. Let us consider an examination where the examinees are being tested for a particular kind of such mental ability (more of an analytical aptitude than just information about a subject) that presumably also follows a bell curve of distribution. For simplicity, we call the stuff that is being tested for as ability. Though examination is the only way one can learn about the actual ability of the examinee, let us take it for granted that there is such a thing called actual ability and we have access to it for the sake of analysis. The marks obtained in the examination will then be called as measured ability.

A perfect exam is that which shows a perfect correlation between the actual and measured abilities. If we were to plot the actual ability along the x-axis and the measured ability along the y-axis, every examinee will lie on the 45 degree line. The perfect exam captures the actual ability of every examinee and can sequence them all so well. Figure 1 shows such a plot. Size of the points show the number of examinees in that range. The exam is designed to have the entire range of marks to capture the fine differences between all the examinees, both at the top-right (clever ones) and at the bottom-left (dumb ones). The marks will show the same bell shape as the actual ability.

Measurement Window

Obviously no such thing like a perfect exam exists. An exam must be completed before the examinees drop dead and must be evaluated in a reasonable time frame and as objectively as possible. This puts a limit on the range of questions (therefore, marks) for the measurement and defines the measurement window as shown in figure 2. M1 and M0 are the highest and lowest possible marks that could be obtained. There will then be examinees who will cluster at the boundaries (shown by the arrows), the actual number of them depending on where the boundaries of this window lie within the range of variation of actual ability.

A public/finishing exam is usually conducted for a very large population at that level. The measurement window is chosen to spread across a wide range. If the exam is designed and conducted properly and in the absence of negative marks, the percentage of marks obtained and the percentile will be similar and will have a reasonable correlation with the actual ability. However, the unavoidable clustering at the top due to the finite size of the measurement could be problem. As in eg., if one needs to resolve and sequence the clever examinees for the purpose of, say, admission to a course that has limited number of seats - so limited that only top 2% are to be picked up. Selection of a small fraction and sequencing them reliably is the perceived need. The problem arises because of the inherent scatter in the data.

Scatter

The scatter in the data arises because of the following reasons. Certain examinees could obtain marks well above their actual ability because (a) they were lucky that the questions asked were closely from what they understood; (b) they undertook targetted training; (c)they cheated; or just that (d)their marks were influenced.

While even a well designed exam, due to the finite time and effort constraints imposed on it, cannot avoid (a) and (b) to some extent, the meticulous conduct and evaluation adhering to good norms can surely avoid (c) and (d).

Certain examinees could obtain marks well below their actual ability because they were (e) not calm and composed (last minute rush, bereavement in family, so many genuine as well as other reasons), (f) not in the best of moods (family pressure, health and what not) during the exam or (g) just plain unlucky that what they understood well was not tested enough in the exam.

The converse of (d) can be taken care of by the conduct of the exam. (g) is the converse of the limitation that led to (a) and can be only minimized but not eliminated fully. (e) and (f) are reality. And reality bites.

What this scatter does is to spread the examinees on either sides of the 45 degree line as shown in figure 3. In the worst case, the points could look like a circular cloud at the center. If the range M1 to M0 is to cover most of the examinee population at the average, then MX is going to be too close to M1. 2% is such a small fraction.

Contradiction of purpose

The finite nature of the measurement window leads to clustering at the ends (the upper end near M1 being our interest). The vagaries of the reality and the constraints on the exam lead to the scatter. This makes an exam that is designed to cover most of the students at the average as unsuitable for selection and sequencing of a very small percentage at the top defined by those between M1 and MX in figure 3.

The solutions could be the following

1. Reduce the scatter: By constant improvements in the exam design and meticulous conduct and evaluation, this is what is being aimed at by the organizers of the selection test. Hopefully.
   


2. Shift the limit M1 up and M0 down. This needs an increase in the duration and marks of the exam: not practicable due to time and efforts constraint on the examinees as well as evaluation system.


3. Shift the the limit M1 up and M0 also up. This means loss of resolution at the bottom end at the advantage of increased resolution at the top. Since we are interested in only selection at the very top, this is one possible option

Selection at the top

Assume we have pushed both M1 and M0 up and have zoomed on to the plot at the top right. It would perhaps look like figure 4. The bell curve on the x-axis shows which section of the population is being looked at. We can make the following observations.

1. The upper limit of measurement M1 is designed and set so high that no one from the finite population of examinees can cross it. The clustering at the top end is avoided and the first few ranks are reliable.


2. If M0 is already near the ability level of the average among the population, there is going to be heavy clustering at the left-bottom. In addition, if negative marks are used to keep the window of M1-M0 large, the percentage of marks obtained is no longer correlated with the percentile. It does not make sense to compare it with the percentage of marks obtained for the broad kind of public exam discussed above.


3. Remember that MX is set such that the number of examinees that have marks between M1 and MX equals the limited number of seats for the course. Because the finite sized measurement window is on the higher end, the resolution at the top improves and the scatter at the top-right is reduced. Due to this, the cut off MX is no longer close to M1. This minimizes the number of examinees in II quadrant. Why is it important? Read on.

Paradoxical II quadrant

In figure 4, you see four quadrants labelled. The point where the cutoff line MX meets the 45 degree line, we drop a vertical down. This vertical line is the cut off of actual ability which is aimed at for the selection into the course. The meaning and implication of the quadrants is given below.

1. The I quadrant shows all the examinees who have scored more marks than the cutoff limit and also have higher actual ability. These are the ones that really deserve to be selected and are also selected.


2. The III quadrant shows the examinees who have scored less marks than the cutoff and also have lesser actual ability. These donot deserve to be selected and are also not selected.


3. The IV quadrant shows those examinees who have scored marks more than MX but have an actual ability less than intended cutoff (the vertical line). These are the lucky fellows who made it in, thanks to the scatter.


4. Now, the II quadrant shows all those poor examinees who have scored less marks than the cutoff MX but have higher actual ability. They could not make it in, because of the scatter.

In the case of selection of astronauts for example, no risk can be taken with regard to those from the IV quadrant. So the limit MX is kept so high that this quadrant is practically eliminated

But the aim of any good selection test for higher education should be to minimize the II quadrant. Looking at the nature of the scatter, it can be minimized only if the limit M1 goes up and the scatter is reduced. Think about it, these two cannot go together all that along. Tougher exam means more coaching to crack it, more pressure to make it and these are behind the scatter. Now you see the paradox?

The II quadrant can also be minimized if MX can be lowered. See it?

Conclusions

1. If there is no need to pick only a small fraction at the top, then there is no issue only! The craze or necessity to be at the top should go.


2. If there is no need to sequence the examinees, then again life is easy. Let bunches of examinees get into groups of courses - the finer sequencing can be an internal matter for the groups of courses later.

Summer Internship Mela

Its summer internship mela these days. Engineering students from all over the country are frantically searching for a host who can tolerate them during the two months this summer. Yet another rat race. Yet another occasion to not tell others what you know, be an early bird to catch that worm and add one more item to the cv. I had an occasion to be involved in this mela in two roles. In responding to students from my institute who ask me for places where they can apply and in responding to students from other institutes who ask if they can do it in my institute.

The internship fever is rather new to the technical institutes in our country. Few years back, the students took up such things out of their own interest whereas it is a curriculum requirement in most colleges these days. In most of the institutes, it is actually a course with couple of credits to be earned and is meant to be done in an industry as a part of the technical education. Metallurgy students do go to Jamshedpur/Bhilai, Aerospace students to Kanpur, Naval Architecture students to Goa/Vizag anyway. This internship is an extra stuff. The original intention in making it as compulsory to fulfill the credit requirement is because it will ensure that the students have adequate exposure to industry. But most students have strange preferences when it comes to practice. Typical perceptions about the possible options I can gather are as follows:

• Local companies (Indian SMEs): shunned. The popular crib is that these companies neither have a proper R&D center, nor are they keen in keeping the interns engaged for something mutually useful. Sometimes there are strings attached to the internship programme (we will take you only if you promise to do your BE/BTech project with us)


• Project work at same institute: Not allowed for those who have to earn credits. The first and second year students who want to spend their summers usefully try for a project to get more exposure to facilities. "Grass on the otherside is greener" is applicable for this option making it as a backup plan.


• Summer fellowship at a premier institute: Useful. IITs, IISc, TIFR, JNCASR - places that students like to spend time doing a project and also earn a reco that comes of good use while applying abroad. This is also a good way to escape having to work at industry as most institutes are willing to take a summer 'fellowship' as a replacement for industrial training.


• MNCs: cool. They pay well, it helps in applying to same MNCs for a fat salary later, the job is sometimes HR/management oriented, sometimes fully computer related like searching patent database (no sweat on shop floor).


• Universities abroad: Cooler: That univ can then be considered as a safe univ while applying abroad (MS/PhD scholarship more or less guarenteed). One reco from abroad while applying to even higher univ is not bad.


• Companies abroad: Coolest. More money, lots of exposure, hopes of landing on a foreign job, looks real cool on CV.

Come summer, no wonder students are on an e-mail spree.

Contacts seem to play the most important role in landing an internship. Some of the public sector companies even have a policy that one of the employees must know the candidate before he/she is accepted as an intern.

The disturbing tendency is that most students want to escape the industrial exposure as part of the curriculum and do a project instead. To get a summer project at an institute 'higher' that the one they are presently in, they seem to adopt a number of routes. The ones I know are:

• Writing to all the faculty whose emails can be found from the internet. Some students are so naive as to include all addresses of faculty of a department in the same e-mail and then write "Dear Sir, I want to work under your guidance". Such mails will get ignored.


• Searching sciencedirect for all papers in a particular area, cut-n-paste email addresses from the online papers on to a text file and then e-mail them en masse. This strategy seem to give good results to some of the students. But I feel it is atrocious.


• Applying en masse to summer internship programme of a particular university abroad. Perhaps, that will make sure one of them will get it. But so many students applying together is such a waste of effort. Also, they all tend to give the same faculty's name as referee. What is the value of such a reference?


• Claiming things in CV that one has not yet done. Listing term papers submitted in a regular course as mini projects. It is difficult for the other person to verify these but it is professionally not acceptable.

I would like to make some suggestions to our young friends.

If the curriculum requires industrial exposure, then take it up. Experience the shop floor for two months and see if you really like/hate that. After all, having survived three semesters of workshop during your BTech, this is no big deal.

Try the local industry knowing well that there may not be much to do. Not much is expected from the internship in the form of a report anyway. Go around and see all the sections of the firm, just for the sake of it. Since it is these firms that are driving the >10% manufacturing growth rate of the nation, figure out the opportunities there. The eyes of all nations are cast on these opportunities here. Where are you looking?

Even if you think you are born to do research, do take these two months off to spend time at industry. Once you start off on your own research and realise how research gets funded in real life, you will realise that everything needs to get connected to industry at the end of the story.

Organize amongst your batch of students who will apply where for the internship programme and do it correctly and professionally. In a rat race, not following the mob has its own great advantage. Uncommon places can fetch you interesting exposure as well as give you confidence that making it through the rat race is not the end of life.

Finally, these things are small things that do not matter much in the long run. Talk to someone who can help about what you really like at this point of time and just do it.

Is the dearth a backlash?

During the PanIIT global conference 2006 at Mumbai, the president stated what many others have also lamented upon - the IITs are unable to attract the best faculty these days. i.e., there is no stampede for assistant professor positions at the IITs. My own theory is that it is not about IITs but about the market forces.

Consider the typical age of a candidate as 31 years. It means the candidates who are now to apply must have made up their mind about higher studies in engineering after their B.Tech which should be around 1995-97. That was exactly the period when the IT boom took place, thanks to the Y2K problem. The mass exodus of students out of engineering fields into IT, both after bachelors and masters degree, both here and in the USA. It left only those very few who are very keen to continue in the technical areas who will now be ready to take up faculty positions. Since the IT boom persisted in a big way till 2001 even in the USA, academic institutes in India may expect a low number of suitable good applicants for the next several years.

Long back (in the pre-IT-boom-era) when one did not want to take up higher studies in engineering in the USA, one would have taken up a job back home. Since the jobs for engineers were all technical, chances are that some of them would have joined higher studies at a later point of time, keeping the number of experienced people in the technical areas reasonable. But the IT thing did happen and that number today is low. After 10 years in IT, what are the chances that the person remembers enough engineering to continue towards Ph.D. and revert back?

I feel it is just plain market forces why not many early 30 year olds are not flocking to academic positions these days. When the demand is large and the supply pool is small, the prices soar up. If you dont want to pay, someone else could be willing to. It is not the traditional situation of "if you dont want to join, someone else equally good could be willing to "- there aren't many out there!. Every boom has a backlash.

Why now is not a bad time to join as faculty in India

Assuming that you have the right attitude, desire and qualifications ... and age,

Consider a typical candidate applying for faculty position in an engineering department. Bachelors degree by an age of 22, two years for masters degree, four years for Ph.D. and a desirable 3 year post-doctoral experience pegs the typical age of a candidate at 31. The age cut off norm in most institutes for entry level jobs (assistant professor) is 35. Thats like four years to make up your mind. Taking the retirement age as 62, it leaves about 25 - 30 years of service at an institute. In an idealized situation, the average age of a typical sized department can be steady at 45 with about one faculty joining and one retiring every year. But that is far from what happens in most organizations. There are usually waves of retirement and recruitment. Most IITs are also undergoing such a wavy pattern of faculty strength with the third generation of faculty being recruiting during the last couple of years. Apparently, now is the time at most IITs.

The government seems to be positive about setting up new IITs. As one professor lamented, there is a need for new faculty at the existing IITs itself. If you are serious and good enough, they are out to grab you.

Now that the 27% OBC reservation is a reality, there is going to be an increase in the faculty strength to handle larger number of students.

To summarize, if one is willing to take up a position at a good institute not necessarily in a major city, then the opportunities are plenty.

Thats about availability. Additionally, funds for research should not be a doubt. Here is why.

During the last few years, the government and its various bodies that fund nearly 90% of the research in the academic institutes in the country are upbeat about increased spending. It is a different matter that research funds are not being fully utilized as has also been mentioned by the president during the 94th Indian Science Congress Meeting at Annamalai university this month. The prime minister said that the expenditure on science and technology will be raised to 2% of GDP over the next five years. No wonder current perception of many faculty at good academic institutes is that the probability of their research proposal being funded as nearly 100% is close to reality. Compare that figure with that in USA (15%). ie., if you are a faculty in India, you dont have to write six proposals to get one through. You write just one decent proposal per project. Nice, isn't it?

when not to join as faculty in India

Here is a collection of tips that I gathered from my friends' and even my own experiences. It is important to know the real situation on ground before taking the most important decision of one's life. It is now clear from the various news items that India needs a large number of quality engineering faculty to take up positions in India. The vacancies are all out there. If you have the right degree and the desire to work and live in India then what stops you from taking the plunge? Well, take a while to look at some issues to be well prepared.

1. When you are in India looking for a job.
   Call it the white man's stamp syndrome or paranoia or plain politics, there are reasons to believe that your chances of getting into top places are best if you apply from abroad. The organizations are sometimes unsure of their ability to spot fresh and bright people that they leave the task to others. Also, if you are abroad, you are exempt from attending the interview in person. That takes care of lot of prejudices that could arise from your appearance and presentation and keep the focus on your CV. All in all, it is a sound idea to pick a nice post-doc position abroad and then apply from there.
2. When you are on your own for money and have little or no bank balance.
   Academic organizations in India do not take care of your initial establishment costs like many IT firms do. If you were a student till you started looking for a faculty position, chances are that you were staying in a hostel room and have no possessions apart from a suitcase of clothes and few trunks of books. Take a look at the cost of starting off life:
   Two cots with beds (15K), DiningTable+Chairs(15K), Typical Indian Kitchen (20K), Bike(40K), TV (10K), Fridge (7K), Almera(8K), Washing machine (20K), AC (20K), Sofa (20K), Vacuum Cleaner (10K), Home PC (20K) etc., all this easily comes to about 200K. You may not need them all on the first day you land the job but once you start living at home independently, you will need them one after the other. If you are married, then you will need more things and more urgently.
   The reason I mentioned the cost of establishing a comfortable home is because you could experience a financial shock if you have to pay for all that from your salary. And that is because your salary is going to be sooooooo small. Whatever people may say about pay commissions or purchase parity blah blah, after taxes and compulsory deductions you will have a maximum of 18K in hand at the end of each month as an assistant professor. If you got the arithmetic right and take power/phone/taxes etc., in to account, you will notice that you cannot setup home and still eat during the first one year of your job.
   The solution is simple. Work abroad as postdoc till you have reasonable savings that will see you through these financial shocks. Remember that every new faculty has an initial phase of frustration (new environment, things not as good as dreamt etc,). Adding a financial frustration to it is only going to make things worse.
3. When you already are married and your spouse wants to work.
   Not every city where a decent academic institute is located can offer opportunities for your spouse to work. Apparently spouse factor is one of the major reasons why many people are unwilling to take up positions at certain institites in India. Take a good look at that issue before taking the plunge.
4. When you desire to own an independent house of your own.
   Forget it. Faculty position is not to make the kind of money that will get you an independent house in the kind of cities where desirable institutes exist. If you are kanjus over an extended period of time, you could perhaps own a flat in some nook of the city. Thats about it.
   Till you retire, most institutes insulate you from the need to find housing by providing one on campus. That is only a temporary solution.
5. When you have financial responsibilities at home.
   Again, faculty position in India and money donot go together. There are exceptional situations where consultancy or honorary chair position could fetch a little more money but the majority take home only peanuts as their salary. Academic job needs peace of mind to do good research work. If you are going to be bothered about other issues, however important they could be, you are going to be suboptimal in your output.

To summarize, you don't have to be an ascetic to be a happy faculty but it helps.

a webpage for women in indian academia

For a long while, through interaction with a number of colleagues, I happened to be aware of a whole bunch of issues that women face in universities and also later on when they try to make a career for themselves. The list of problems that a working woman faces, particularly in India, is definitely a long one. With all the freedom goodies that an academic career offers, it is all the more important that gender sensitive problems in academia are sorted out so that more women can take up such careers. I have created a webpage to list out these issues and also info that could be of use. Warning: This page is only a first draft of the stuff and will evolve as I learn more. If you have anything to add to this page, please feel free to share it.

about the title

adavilO kEka - transliterated from telugu. It means a shout in the forest. Like a blog. A shout out of fear, frustration, anger, joy, thrill or whatever. Expression is first. To be heard, is secondary. BTW, This is my first blog post.
I read lots of blogs. I find it like talking out of sync. Ofcourse, talking to people is something I do love. If I want to say something, it is goes usually around education, out reach and a whole bunch of tools that I play with during work and otherwise. Mine is a small world, you see!