Are grad students really low paid?

A typical assistantship in a US university grad program pays in the neighborhood of about $1500 a month. Anyone can see that this number is much too low for the time and effort a grad student invests in the research lab or in teaching and would be hardly enough to pull through his/her long years in grad school. Are the grant agencies and universities oblivious to this? No. What we most often miss out is that along with this stipend, the student's tuition is also taken care of. So the actual cost to the professor/department who offers the assistantship, is the stipend (1500*12) + 24 credits a year tuition cost. This is a pretty significant number. In public schools, the tuition could hover around 20K a year. Needless to say, private schools are much more expensive. Once a grad student is done with the course requirement set by the department within a year or two into the program, he/she usually ends up registering for 9 research credits just to stay a full time student. Now, the university typically arrives at a particular cost of X dollars per credit based on various factors that include infrastructure, pay to the faculty, facilities, maintanence, etc.  This number, makes perfect sense for someone who enrolls for a course that is offered by the university. Why then should a research credit also cost the same?

Typically, when a professor gets a grant for pursuing a problem, he has to pay a fraction of that grant to the university that lets him use their resources for conducting research. He then possibly employs a graduate student by offering him an assistantship from that grant money. Towards this assistantship, the professor again ends up paying for the X research credits the student registers for to the university. Isnt this redundant? What is the university's cost towards offering a research credit to a graduate student? Whatever the expense, its already paid for by the fraction that it gets when the grant is awarded to its faculty. 

Why cant the university then charge lesser for its research credits? Just by reducing the cost of the research credit, universities can turn this poor grad student pay scale significantly. The saved money could be diverted into a higher stipend (thereby attracting more students into grad school, eventually increasing the quality of the student pool) or if that is unacceptable (should a section of the academic community decides to keep lab rats poor), pump it back into the project (the research needs money anyway). In any case, its a  win-win situation. 

Science and society

Dr.Humphrey's quote in class today: 


In most countries' legal systems (actually he said US, but I think its safe to extrapolate to others too), you are innocent unless proven guilty.


In science however, you are guilty unless you can prove your innocence. 


What this means is, when you are discovering something unseen by others, inventing something not done before, there are so many unknown errors/deviations that can creep in, that unless you acknowledge their presence through quantification or take care of them in your design, you are doing bad science.


As an afterthought I wonder if there can really be anything called bad science. It can be science or it can be trash.  If its bad science, it wont be long before its proven its trash or its swept happily away under carpet and forgotten forever.

Morning Saaga!

Its one thing to be woken up by mechanical alarm clock sounds in the morning, and another to be woken up by your wife's apa-shruthi singing of the sa-ri-ga-mas at the top of her voice accompanied by constant 10 second even higher pitched corrections from the computer (thanks to skype and internet, her guru lives in the far away land of carnatic music :) )! 

With the time difference of 10 and half hours between India and our little apartment, the only feasible class timings so far have been worked out to be the golden time of 5:30 to 6:30 AM !! 

The thing is, when you wake up listening to a tune, you end  up humming it the entire day.... I wouldnt mind humming a good geetham... but sa-sa ri-ri ga-ga ma-ma pa-pa??!! 

And how come only sa-ri-ga-mas? Well she has some 'Janta'-attachment with the Janta-varasas... every time she comes to this lesson, something happens and the guru changes! i can only hope and pray she quickly gets past this stage and get into atleast good singing of geethas soon.

Any carnatic music teachers out there, please respond :)

Nenu "Adiga"na?!!

Aravind Adiga is a deranged man. He needs serious psychiatric help. Read... (actually dont read) his books to see what I mean. The fellow portrays people in such shades of black and white, with frothing evil... actually on an after thought... there are no characters with any shades of white.. the good people are losers... the murderers and perverts are characters shaped by circumstances... and these are the "hereos" from him??!

He portrays the country with such seething black.. he shows a virtual breakdown of a system and the timelines in the stories are as recent as the early 2000s... i really dont think its that bad... in fact, it cannot be that bad in the third worldest of the third world countries.... leave alone india... he brings in this typical attitude that in India anything... ANYTHING can be done with some money arranged... and that we are a nation teeming with abject poverty..... I agree we are a poor nation.. i even agree that corruption exists.... but come on.... theres more to the country than just that... in his wiki entry, theres a statement that says:

"...it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society (Indian). That's what I'm trying to do -- it is not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination."

to borrow a line from his own novel.... "WHAT A FUCKING JOKE"... first i think hes a very ameatur writer... there are factual fallacies... black bags become brown by the end of the chapters...

this guy is a joke... and giving him a booker prize for the white tiger is a even greater joke...his second book is aptly name between the assasins... assasination of any quality reading I am sure...

so disappointing to have read his book in the kindle (courtesy TAMU "educational" media services :))

Somethings wrong somewhere

Theres a lot of wrong going on around.... and theres a lot of good too.... and thats what makes it a world.... it takes all kinds alright....but these are some of things that I am coming across more frequently off late... and something about them is not right...

1) Attitudes of teachers of high school in Andhra Pradesh

My brother is now going through what I had been through a decade ago.... only the magnitude of the pressure has since increased by the multitude...the uncertainty of what the future holds, the fear of the failure at the most critical juncture of life, the pressures of a nerve wrecking 3 hours that changes our lives forever...oh the kids of 11th/12th have already enough to worry about... and obviously the higher the stakes, the higher the parents would be ready to invest in.... naturally turning the whole thing into a humongous economic potential.. and even more naturally tapped into by the managements of "semi" residential schools, tutorial colleges, tutoring/coaching centers, and the more "rank" fetching junior colleges....

firstly, its wrong to make a business out of education... i very strongly believe certain institutions of the society are more than a business... they are more a social responsibility than an industry...and thats why the governments should intervene and regulate.... healthcare and education should and will always top that list....

Knowing our politicians who bring in socialism only when it directly can help them raise their own personal fortunes... and knowing even too well, the most "retired" politicians run the education business, it only makes sense to see that the junior college and the professional colleges have been left unregulated for too long.....

while the kind of money charged is one thing, what is even more saddening to see is that during the most impressionable years, these teens are day in and out told that wouldnt succeed at that entrance exams for the professional courses at the first shot!!! why??? just so they can come back to the college for a "long" term "tutoring" that would then "equip" them to crack the entrance the second time..... CRAZY!.... first they cram very very high concepts of biology and calculus into two years of the 11 and the 12th.... thanks to our vedic genes, most of us do manage to get it in time and be ready for it atleast 4 months ahead of the exams..... the following months is just pure revision and tremendous practise with mock tests that train us into handling almost any kind of questions....after all this, tell me how can anyone go back to the learning the same thing all over for another year? of what good is that teaching? and of what good are these teachers who instead of instilling courage and confidence to face these exams, tell us that we are bound to fail and we should already consider joining them again for a long term training?

pathetic.... i only hope this is the nadir and the next generation quickly starts climbing up the quality curve...

2) Desis and quickstar, amway.....

Ever since I have been in the US, I come across these people at a regular frequency... only the language and tone is different based on what year I have been in the US... first year (and mostly unfunded year) "I have a project I could use some help on"... second/third and subsequent years.... "what do you do on the weekends? how about some little fun work that would get you some extra buck?"...

theres nothing wrong in amassing personal wealth... each one to his own..... but seriously dude.... why are you frigging using the pretext of friendship??!! why are guys bringing this to a point that no one can ever get friendly to new people without them getting alarmed about another quickstar crack?? its now come to this....a compliment from a random desi at the mall? back off... quickstar guy.... random scraps on orkut introducing as some mutual friend's friend? BACK OFF!!!! AMWAY TO NOWAY!!! it just drives you nuts.... why cant these quick star people understand they LOSE MORE FRIENDS THAN THEY EVER MAKE? (do they ever make any friends?)... why cant these crazy nuts understand that MOST people wouldnt want their frigging amway soaps.... we have our walmart where we can choose what we want!!!! its like they are out on a hunt and unassuming desis like us are their prey??!!! somethings wrong somewhere....

Books are like balloons

"Books are like balloons.... They take me from one world to another"

Aparna Akka, gave me this bookmark, long ago when i was a kid still considering Enid Blytons and hardy boys as "big" novels that take a lot of time to read....... then, the bookmark was interesting... with this nice snoopy picture.... colourful... and I cherished it coz it came from aparna akka...

Today, it brings in a whole new meaning.... true...... books indeed take us away into a new world... a world created by its author... so wonderfully etched... where your senses actually sense what the author intends to....you go on to "experience" new situations you have never been.... like in the Riot by Shashi Tharoor,you can feel the claustrophobia, the mob feeling....as also the undulating love towards a partner, and the guilt of adultry, all or most of which you probably will never be in throughout a normal life time.

Another such book, that takes us into a whole new world, that I had the good fortune of reading, is Life of Pi, by Yann Martel.

It describes the ordeal of a teenager boy who survives a trans-pacific crossing in a lifeboat, that he has to share with a fully grown bengal tiger. Now, though I have been raised in coastal cities, for most part of my life, I dont know what it feels like to be in deep sea, till I read this book that is...... its fantastic narration of the dangers and the sights of the great ocean.... man, I almost got sea-sick.... interestingly, what I imagined to be, might nowhere be close to what it really feels like... but then, like the book said, isnt reality a transformation of what we imagine to be?

What separates a book from a movie, is that you are taken through a story at a pace that is set by the director of the movie... while the book, i can end up reading a single line for an hour, savoring every single word of the sentence, building my own perspective with what the words describe, and still go along with the pace intended.....

books, sigh..... its very difficult not to fall in love with them, once you start taking to them.....

Encounters with the third kind

All of us would have had some sort of encounter with eunuchs... and for most, the experience wouldnt have been pleasant.... So, when Mahesh Dattani, wrote this article in The week, I felt the fellow was not making much sense.

Here is my mail to him :

Hey,

I just read your article in The Week and I found it interesting. For someone whos travelled four years between chennai and mumbai in a train, and for someone whos lived in mumbai subsequently for 2 more years, I can more than recognise the familiar tap. I am afraid of eunuchs. And I am ready to accept that. But this arguement of completeness, I am not ready to buy. Apparently, most of the articles/books/documentaries I read/saw about them, talk about how good they are as human beings and all that. Maybe true. In fact, lets accept that it is true. That eunuchs are a beautiful set of people and wonderful human beings. But for the common man walking on the road, all he needs is his amount of "free" space to carry on doing what he intends to do without a hindrance. Now, I dont know if it comes because they are ostracized, or because we fear them, but lets face it, the eunuchs do take advantage of this.

To me, as a man on the road, isnt it disgusting to see someone touching me supposedly provocatively, sexually, putting up a nauseating performance in full view of the rest of the public, just because I deny turning in my hard earned money when asked for? Dont you think its them trying to cash this disgust, more than my feeling of disgust in the first place thats pushed them towards begging?

Think about this. A handicapped person with non-working limbs, on a wheelchair has the respect/sympathy of the people in any public transport or building. If the same person resorts to begging? He still gets the money based on sympathy. Now, does that mean that the sympathy of the public has pushed him towards an easier resort to make money?No. Its just a choice and set of circumstances that drove him/her to doing it.... but the society does accept either form of it. It takes time, but I think the society would eventually start accepting these non-conventional people into the mainstream. A few hundred years back, being handicapped meant being cut off from an active earning life forever. But now, there is some ray of hope. Handicapped people do find jobs, do try and live self sufficiently.Cant the same be true with eunuchs too? Why do they have to resign themselves to their fate, and continue capitalizing the fear/disgust of more normal people?

Its this apect about them that I think most people hate. Its for this nauseating behaviour that eunuchs as a class of people put up at the drop of the hat, thats feared. I dont think its my subconsciousness acknowledgment of the fact that they are far more complete than me. If they are more complete, so be it. So what? Does that make any difference to way I lead my life or the way they lead theirs? At the end of the day, no matter how social an animal a man is, isnt he driven by whether his needs are taken care of or not? In more civilised societies of today, I am sure they would be accepted too. All it takes for them would be to adhere to the simple norms of the society. Is that difficult?

Kaushik Lakkaraju


And he responded:

dear Kaushik

thank you for your well thought out rationale on why people hate eunuchs. I am in no way condoning the hostility or attention grabbing tactics of the eunuchs. Consider this, if you had no access to public transport, government hospitals, cemeteries etc. If people looked at you with disgust simply because of your appearance, how civilised or polite would you be? I know a lot of people including the government who would give jobs to handicapped people but do you know of anyone who would give a job to a eunuch?

I appreciate the eunuchs because they do not want our sympathy. How easy it would be for them to play the victim and live off the few rupees that buy us our 'feel good' moments. I too have had unpleasant experiences with eunuchs (jsut as I have had unpleasant experiences with some men, women, Hindus, christians etc) but when I am polite and look them in the eye and request them to leave me alone, they have been very obliging.

Anyway, I really appreciate your response. I like the closure. Yes, in more civilised societies they would be accepted. I would like to change the last line a bit and say 'All it takes for US is to adhere to simple norms of society. Is that difficult?"

warm regards, and may you have many hassle free train journeys!

Mahesh