Reflections on Insights Gained from Talking to Researchers, Rant on the Indian Education System

Hello! I am delighted to have you reading my blog, even more than you might feel honoured by the fact that you are getting to read my first post, trust me! I have written this post with the intention of sharing some of my exciting activities from around New Year's, so you can experience at least a fraction of my excitement and even more importantly, learn from them.

Christmas Eve was just a few days away, and planning for parties and other events had already started in my hostel. Little did they know that I would be covertly engaged in a clandestine operation that would be much more gratifying than their little events which at most would give them a fleeting sense of pleasure that won't last for even a week. I, on the other hand, didn't derive any sort of pleasure from such activities and hence didn't bother with trying to even pretend otherwise.

I had been reading about some topics Neuroscience and Psychology that I had been fascinated for the past few weeks, and I had been attending several one-on-one virtual meetings in a day with researchers and graduate students from all over the world from labs working on my areas of interest. I had been able to do this by sending over 300 mails to professors and graduate students all over the world from institutions like LSE, Amherst and Caltech, and received around 50 replies. The rest of this post will focus on my experiences with reaching out to researchers and the lessons I have learned till now.

Too Early?

The first point of contention that arises whenever I bring up this topic in front of my parents and almost anyone associated with the current Indian education system who I think could guide me is undoubtedly that I'm going too fast; I should slow down a little, because after all I'm still in my first semester. My parents also tell me to be like others, enjoy college life and "have fun" while I try to explain that I actually am having fun and I would be very unsatisfied if I followed their way of having fun.

I try to explain that I can't just sit still and wait for things to happen to me, and give power to external factors in determining how my life turns out, and so I must not spend a single second not working towards my ambitions or being the person I want to be. I'd also like to say that I realize the extent to which external factors like genes and chance exert control over our live, and I am comfortable with the idea of determinism, but let's assume everyone has free will for our present purpose, though we may as well now go ahead and make more bold and erroneous assumptions like assuming a spherical cow in Physics. Anyway.

Upcoming rant on the Indian education system. Some people may experience PTSD flashbacks or be reminded of the harsh reality they had managed to escape or gaslight themselves in believing never exited, so you have been warned. I have several issues with it, and I'm also one who believes in doing rather than complaining, but it plays a crucial role in enabling children to develop their curiosity and realize their potential, so it must be discussed.

It's like a one-size-fits-all system that has changed very little over the year, and even though the National Education Policy seems to be a step in the right direction, we're still a ways of from having anything close to a system that would make education fun and engaging and actually teach children concepts that are relevant to their life and not just feed them material to rote-memorize and regurgitate on exams with the sole purpose of getting good marks. We still haven't developed objective and reliable ways free of all bias to determine if our education system is working, but we can surely do better than this.

Every kind of student is made to take the same courses, sit in the same classes and learn the same material. There is too much rigidity in the curriculum and it's never an option to explore your interests in university. I don't even expect them to do that in the near future and hence never depend on educational institutions to satisfy my intellectual curiosity, which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest upsides or living in the age of information.

But I notice that a vast majority of students are not passionate about what they are studying, and one of the reasons could be that they're not aware of all the exciting topics, and the sense of joy you get from intuitively grasping a concept in a topic you're passionate about, the possibility of building innovative products that could have a large-scale social impact, or get closer to understand the fundamental principles of the universe. They are forced to choose a 'stream' in grade 10, and that severely restricts what they could become for the rest of their lives and closes several opportunities available to them in the country.

Another problem is the lack of support and research facilities. For instance, the topic I'm interested in is very new to my country, and my university doesn't have any researchers working on it. But I'm glad to be living in an age where almost anything is possible with the right amount of motivation and an internet connection.

But is it too early?

I just went off on a tangent and got distracted from the main topic, something I'm very prone to, but now I'd like to get back to address the question of whether or not university is too early to get involved in research. My answer is: No, but under certain circumstances, which are that you should be genuinely motivated by a topic, be willing to step out of your comfort zone to discover new opportunities, and have the kind of environment that is supportive of your interests and aspirations. The less convenient but still not impossible alternative to the last point is that you create around you the environment that you want to be a part of, including building a community consisting of peers you wish to collaborate with or bringing about a change in the way a system works to meet your requirements.

I don't like to base my decisions upon my intuitions, but I also don't like to completely disregard them, because that's irrational. Instead I try to objectively put all my intuitions to test and try to collect evidence both in favour of and against them. Same goes for my interests, or what I feel like my interests are. It's a very confusing topic, and I still have questions that everyone I have asked has been unable to answer due to it's subjective nature, but those are not as relevant to our present discussion.

In all of my meetings, I asked how it was that they decided that a PhD is for them? How did they determine whether their interests are genuine and are likely to stay constant over the next few years, and sustain them throughout the long and hard years of studying for a PhD, and even afterwards when they have to deal with the less appealing aspects of a career in research such as repeated failed experiments with no clear solution in sight?

Two answers that were the same for almost everyone. One was that they found the material interesting, and the second was that they tried research and liked it. Trying research is important so you know whether or not you like the actual work, or just have a casual interest that could be satiated by reading popular science books and keeping up with scientific magazines.

Connecting it with the main topic, you can now see why getting involved in research early is a good thing. You get to determine your interests early on, so even if you decide you don't want to be a researcher, you just learned something important about yourself and get closer to a rough idea of what you would want your future career to look like. It's also a good idea to realize sooner than later what you are passionate about and then start working towards it as early as possible, because life is short and I suspect that even though it's never too later, it's not a very desirable situation to discover your true interests on your deathbed.

One important factor I'd like to elaborate a little more on is motivation. It does depend on how much you explore, but we also can not deny that it's something you happen to have in some amounts by nature. Some people are more motivated and ambitious than others, and even the same person may not be ambitious about one topic as much as another. So it's perfectly fine if you're the sort of person who likes to take it slow, and you're satisfied with it.

In fact, it's even favorable to be such a person in an education system such as I described, because we currently don't understand much about things like interests and aptitude. You do you, because after all you didn't choose the genes or the neural makeup that led to you having your current preferences and desires. What's missing is support for students who are not fine with the current methods of teaching and lack of research opportunities, and it's essential that their ambition and motivation not be stifled, or worse, because of the system. And I suspect that such people are far fewer than the first type of people, so they need to make their own way.

This is an issue that deserves a post of it's own, and I'm also planning to initiative to build a community of such people so their motivation is not negatively affected by lack of support from their environment and all the outdated ideas parents and teachers still have about what is and what is not possible at what age, and so that they can connect with other like-minded people and not think that they are alone.

I think that I'm fairly good at resisting the discouragement and not letting other people's pre-conceived notions of what a student is supposed to do affect my plans and aspirations, but this may not be the case for everyone out there, and we might miss out on some motivated kids with a promising future only if they are provided with the opportunities and environment that enables them to realize their potential. I have some thoughts related to education and neuroscience too, but let's keep that for another time.

Not Being Good Enough

There is nothing quite similar to the wave of inferiority complex and existential dread that strikes me when I read about the latest child prodigy who created a nuclear reactor in his dad's garage, solved cancer and world hunger, won this year's noble prize, and got admits to MIT and Harvard. I have recently realized that this feeling is, like most other feelings, irrational, and I should not compare myself with others who are in different circumstances and have different opportunities and levels of support.

BUT, this is only true if I obsess over it. In moderate amounts, I think that this feeling is something deep in my psyche pushing me to be someone I wish to be, and to change some current situation in my life and strive to be my best self. This is also a theory supported by some new findings in the nascent field of evolutionary psychiatry, and I have my doubts about whether the suffering caused by emotions are commensurate with the benefits they seem to provide, but let's not get into that right now because it's irrelevant to the present discussion.

So the best approach that I have come up with is something I learned from Stoic philosophy. It's to be ambitious and do the best of your abilities to achieve that goal, with whatever you have been given and by focusing on only what is under your control, for example your mindset and attitude. But not wasting time worrying about anything that is out of your control, for example the outcome of your actions, which is influenced by an interplay of several complicated factors out of your direct control.

Getting back to the main topic, I noticed that such news is often based in the West, which seems to be better at providing research support and facilities to high-school students.

Ideal Academic Background

A degree is getting less relevant today, and even more so in some fields than others. For instance, a degree in computer science is as much of a requirement to get a good programming job as a degree in the life sciences is to be a researcher in Neuroscience. Possibly because the life sciences are very theory intensive, and also involves lab-work that is not possible to do on your own. On the other hand, you can always develop programming skills on your side from all the wide range of resources available to you on the net.

One more misconception that was cleared for me in a meeting with a physician-scientist was regarding the topic of interdisciplinarity. I used to think that I would explore all the disciplines from the start and keep at it all the way till I become a researcher, as this idea is consistent with my desire to learn a lot of different topics and not restrict myself to just one. But after the conversation, I realized that it's probably a better option to first develop a strong foundation in a discipline and establish your expertise in it, and later get involved in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Why? Can't I just learn everything there is to learn all by myself? Why the constraint, and why the collaboration? Well, today we live in the age of information, and every subject has sub-fields that people can't cover even when they devote their whole lives to it. Everything studies more or less some aspect of the universe, just at different levels of abstraction and using different methods. You explore topics and see what you like doing, then select a few questions you wish to investigate, and use tools and methods from different disciplines to solve those problems. Exposure to multiple disciplines would also help you discover novel ways in which you can combine different topics.

It's still needed that some people take a birds-eye view and are able to connect different disciplines; I too aspire to be able to uncover hidden connections and analogies between seemingly unrelated fields, and use tools of one discipline to solve problems of another. But I also understand that I can not just go about learning everything, given my limited cognitive resources and time, so it is best for me to just focus on topics that suit my interests and aptitude, and take inspiration from Dr. Stephen Wolfram and Elon Musk for the rest of it.

If you ever read about how they come up with their discoveries or innovations, what they do is first come up with a set of questions they wish to solve, and tackle it with the tools they have expertise in. For the areas in which others have more experience and skill, they contact and ask them relevant questions to absorb all the knowledge they require to solve their problem. And finally they attempt to unify all the pieces of information they have acquired into a coherent whole, like bringing together different pieces of a puzzle, and seeking help for finding missing pieces when you are unable to find them.

Another misconception that I used to have when I was younger was that breakthroughs in science are made by individuals isolated from others, lone once-in-a-generation geniuses like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. But I soon realized that it doesn't represent the reality of scientific research, doesn't closely resemble it at all. Even if you somehow manage do to science in an isolated lab on some uninhabited island, you would be working on ideas that you borrowed from someone, and that were developed by people who came before you, and with tools that were developed by others. Science is a collaborative effort, and it was only with the support of the people in your immediate environment that the great scientists were able to make their discoveries. They need to bounce off ideas with other researchers, and have their ideas verified by others, otherwise it's just hypothesizing and mental gymnastics with armchair philosophy.

I also asked the researcher and graduate students whether they're required to specialize in a narrow set of topics and methods, or if they have the flexibility to examine a question using various methods and techniques. It depends on the lab, but most have the flexibility to investigate a topic from multiple perspectives. And as I mentioned earlier, interdisciplinarity is a necessary thing in today's era.

A very important skill I want to share with you that everyone told me is very important in whichever field I go, either in academia or industry, I want to share with you, is programming. A data science and programming is going to be useful in almost whatever you do, and it's been suggested as one of the most useful skills to develop during your undergraduate years. Reach out to labs working on your topics of interest, not just in your country but all over the world, and you'd be surprised by the amount of people who are willing to give you advice and happy to provide guidance. Apply for internships abroad. Surround yourself with peers who have similar interests, values and levels of motivation, and never let anyone pull you down.

One more problem with the education system in India and many other places is the excessive focus on marks. It's the marks that determine what college you get into, and your rank determines your stream. Not your interest or motivation. Just a number on a single examination is expected to capture your academic ability. No essay component that you could use to demonstrate your interest and aspirations, or extracurriculars that are accumulated over a long period of time, just the marks which may have been influenced by several factors out of your control, or which may require a skillset different from your true talents. This can be demotivating for a lot of students who have talents in different domains.

The problem isn't just that fish are forced to climb trees, the education system is also pretty good at killing the motivation of students. I won't elaborate on it in this post, but please do check out a blogpost on my website related to why this is the case and a new project of mine I'm working on to tackle this problem, especially if you are an aspiring researcher or a student interested in getting involved in research.

Try to find people with similar values and interests who are supportive of your plans, but also try to expose yourself to people different from you too, but overdoing it could get lonely. Absolutely not speaking from experience; I just happen to have a very deep insight into the human psyche and human nature, and yes I can read what's currently going through your mind, and I'm comfortable with sharing this with you because it's very unlikely that you'd believe me, and that's exactly what I want you to think so I can read your mind without arousing any suspicions.

One more question I asked everyone is whether the skills you learn in a PhD program are transferable to industry, because industry job market is very competitive nowadays and some people just may decide not to go down that path after completing their PhD. Answer- Depends on your field, but if you're learning programming and data science skills, you will have plenty of options in industry too. Even if you are more into lab work, you would be able to find some role in the biotechnology industry.

Another misconception I'd like to clear is that if you are doing a PhD, you are only interested in research. It's true that you should get a PhD only if you love research, but it doesn't mean at all that you can only do research with it. If you dislike the way research is done in academia or find that some organization is doing work more aligned with your interests, you could always get a research role in industry, at companies such as DeepMind and OpenAI. You could go down the startup or entrepreneurship path and convert some discovery you made in your research into an innovative product that could have large-scale impact on society.

And you could do that even if you work on basic or fundamental scientific research, just look at D. E. Shaw and Stephen Wolfram, used ideas from their research to build very successful organizations that also allow allow them to fund their basic research and not depend on any external grants, as well as have a large scale-social impact at the same time by creating products that add value to people's lives. You also don't need to emulate anyone's path; you can create your own unique career and do whatever you want. If what you want to be is something no one has ever been, it should be more encouraging than discouraging, because it means you're treading on unexplored territory and that's the a step in the right direction if you want to come up with a original innovative research or breakthrough product idea that causes a paradigm shift or changes the way people live. Don't let society's preconceived notions of what you can and can't be stop you from being what you truly want to be. Best of luck!

Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in discussing any of the points I touched upon in this post, or if you have similar aspirations or interests, I'd like to know more about them!

Would love to have a chat with another oddball with similar research interests or even interest in different topics with similar levels of ambition or motivation, and a desire to understand the fundamental principles governing the universe and have an impact on society.