Friday, November 27, 2009

The Pain of being a nine point someone

I don't know what Chetan Bhagat has written in his first novel "five point someone"; I just know that the phrase five point someone refers to those IITians who has CPI (cumulative performance index) between 5 and 6. It's quite well-known the kind of depression an IITian suffer from when he or she fails to perform in the academic system as it was expected. This has led to many incidents in different IIT's where students chose the most extreme step to come out of this stress and depression. Recently in IIT Bombay, there was a suicide case by a student of 2nd year BTech programme. His poor performance in class is said to be the probable reason behind it. But why such students get admitted after all? Does not it mean that the IIT entrance system of admitting students to various programs have failed totally? Is there any huge gap between the admission criteria and the academic standards? I am not an expert to answer such questions. But I would like to mention one point that poor performance may not be the only reason behind depression. There are other reasons also which are overlooked most of the time. IIT system has many faults in it which can even make an academic topper feel depressed. I do not need to talk about anyone else. Myself is the best example. I have always been an academic topper till my BSc. During my MSc in IIT B also I was the second topper among the 2 year MSc as well as MSc-PhD dual degree students and could maintain a CPI of 9.15 at the end of two years. Unfortunately CPI is not everything which count in life. After I moved into research part of my MS-PhD dual degree course, my expectations, my motivations and my excitements started disappearing. The first blow came to me when my supervisor was appointed as dean in a different IIT, and he had to shift there temporarily and he is still there. Its one and half year till then he has not come back to his home institute and during this one and half year neither I have any publication with him nor any good progress in work has happened. May be I am not a very smart guy to do research through email discussions. Although I spent few months in that IIT where my supervisor is appointed as dean, I could not do much work since he hardly could give me time. That was quite natural since a dean has to do lots of non-academic things. The second and the most recent blow came when I got the news that my supervisor is going to Canada on sabbatical for one year. So I will be completing almost two and half years without any good research work by the end of 2010. Aren't these more than enough to bring too much depression and stress into life? The IIT system doesn't care what will happen to a PhD student if his/her supervisor is sent to some other place to do some no-academic things, it does not care what will happen to a student when a faculty goes on sabbatical for one year. IIT should give a thought about all these and should not run into a conclusion that only poor academic performance creates stress, depression among students.

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