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From my colleagues

For undergraduate students contemplating further studies at IISc, Anindya Chatterjee of the Department of Mechanical Engineering provides a fair and balanced assessment.

K.S. Gandhi (Department of Chemical Engineering) finds curious parallels between scientific research and the game of cricket .

Advice for graduate students

With success in graduate studies being a pre-requisite for a career in research, it is not at all surprising that this topic has attracted some serious research. However, what I find really perplexing is why computer science types have come to dominate this field so comprehensively ...

This article by Marie desJardins is certainly among the best. It cites David Chapman's article, which is also good. In addition, there is a fairly large number of compilations of web articles dishing out advice. The list maintained by Scott Keogh, a zoologist at the Australian National University, is one of the best. In particular, check out the cynical and modest advice from a couple of zoologists from the University of California, Berkeley. Another good list is maintained by Dan Horn at the University of Michigan.

M. Giridhar (Chemical Engineering) has also compiled a bunch of stuff here.

Effective Research

Michael Nielsen of the University of Queensland says he wrote the essay Principles of Effective Research to "... hold up in the sharpest possible terms an ideal of research I believe is worth working toward". There is a follow-up by Suresh Venkatasubramanian on Nielsen's thoughts on problem solvers and problem-creators; Suresh also provides a link to an article titled The Two Cultures of Mathematics by the 1998 Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers at the University of Cambridge. Also check out this article by Nielsen, where he talks about the role of personal effectiveness in "tough learning".

One of the popular articles on this topic is the one titled You and Your Research by Richard Hamming, who was a Bell Labs researcher (short bio can be found here and here). Here is a nugget from the lecture: "If you don't work on important problems, it's not likely that you'll do important work".


T. A. Abinandanan: abinand (at) iisc.ac.in
Last update: 15 September 2020