 Hello everyone, welcome to yet another experience sharing sessions by violating India and this session would be on PhD and the many possibilities ahead. We have with us Ananya Mundan. Ananya is currently pursuing her PhD at Ludwig-Maxmedens University in Munich, Germany in the area of human cognitive neuroscience. She aims to better understand multi-sensory spatial attention in humans with the help of controlled experiments conducted inside virtual reality using spatial auditory and visual stimuli. Before joining her PhD, she did her master's in Neural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Hyderabad after completing a bachelor's in statistics from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. Welcome Ananya. Thanks for conducting this experience sharing session. Over to you. Hello everyone. So today as mentioned by Sukanya, I'll be talking about PhD and the many opportunities ahead. Now before going to the many opportunities, let's look at what a PhD is. So as you all know, it is a short for Doctor of Philosophy and it is the highest academic degree that one can attend. And it normally takes around three to five years of full-time scholarship and research work towards a thesis resulting in an original contribution to the subject. Now these were all very factual information that I gave you. To better understand what a PhD exactly is, I would use this very famous illustration by Professor Matt Might who like shows, like if you can see this black circle here, that's all of human knowledge. And throughout our schooling, say secondary and primary school, we gain some amount of knowledge in all fields, which becomes a bit narrower with our bachelor's and master's degree. Now with the PhD, it reaches the tip of this human knowledge and in the end creates this small dent, which is your original contribution towards the field. So if you just think about it, it's amazing that you actually pull the human knowledge to its extreme and add something to it with your PhD. So with this thought, let's move forward to looking at what it is exactly like doing a PhD. If you go through the internet and search what is it like doing a PhD, you might come across infographics like this, which very nicely shows a step-by-step progression of what a research process is. And it generally starts with defining a research problem followed by reviewing the literature to see what is done and what is left to be done in the field. And then again followed by selecting a research design and formulating a hypothesis after which carrying out the actual research, collecting data and interpreting those results. And after all these steps, you report the results and publish it in the form of research articles. Now if you think about it, it looks very simple just to follow the steps one by one and you'll be done by it. But in my personal experience and in the experience for a lot of other PhD students, research seldom is like that. And to think like to think about it, it wouldn't be as fun if it was just a straight road. It's often a very hilly terrain where you have to traverse through hilly regions and overcome a lot of failures. And that in itself is probably the essence of what a PhD is because you are searching for something which no one has ever looked for. And therefore you're bound to face failures and also overcome from those failures. Now I'd like to tell you some of the transferable skills from a PhD that you might gain. And these skills that I mentioned are universal to any PhD you do in any discipline be it an engineering PhD, computer science and neuroscience or even sociology or economics PhD. So these are the so-called soft skills which will gain and which you can actually transfer it to any other career that you carry on after your PhD. The first most important is time management. Now while doing your PhD you'll just not be conducting your research project. Along with your research project you'll also be teaching, taking courses, writing up reports, publishing, communicating your research at conferences and all these takes time. So at the end of your PhD you can really be assured that you'll become a master in time management. Next is project management. Seldom it happens that a PhD student just handles one project. It's often a lot of projects and you have to juggle through them and at the end of it you just really become good at administrative qualities project management qualities which can again be transferred to any other job just not a research job. Ability to collaborate. Yes, this is important because scientific research seldom happens in isolation. So a good scientific research happens from scientists coming from various disciplines sitting together and trying to look at a problem at different perspectives. And if you're doing a PhD you'll also find yourself in such a situation where different people from different disciplines are coming together and looking at one problem. In this way it really inculcates a team building exercise and your ability to collaborate with others and work with others increases exponentially. Leadership skills, yes. So like I mentioned before there'll be other people who will be helping you in different aspects of your PhD project, but it is your research project, right? So you are the one who should be pulling it, leading it and therefore very naturally you will adapt and inculcate these leadership skills. Next is adaptability. This is a very important skill no matter where you are. You need to adapt to this changing environment, changing research scenario, changing skill requirement. So that's again something which is again very important. Accelerated learning, right? So let's say you're doing a research project in human neuroscience. So like I do using auditory and visual stimuli. Now I don't have a lot of experience in auditory engineering, but to produce my stimuli to give the proper kind of stimuli to my human subjects. I need to have certain amounts of auditory engineering expertise. And I had to learn that in a very limited amount of time. So these kind of skills which are related to your research but you have not done before you have to learn and inculcate. You have to do it in a very small period of time. And this is also a very important skill. You have to look into, you have to pay attention to details in smallest to smallest things because a small change in your experiment can mean a huge thing for your overall theoretical perspectives. And then so eventually you just learn to pay attention to these details. Critical thinking and analysis. Well, I don't think I have to focus on this as much because when you are inquiring about something which has not been done before, you need to have this critical thinking and these data analysis skills to make sense of what your data is and where to put it in the whole overall framework. So this is again a very common exercise which busy students have to do in our daily basis. Last but not the least is writing proficiency and communication skills. Well, you've done all these research collected all these data have really nice results but now you need to communicate it to the community to the scientific community as a whole and to general humankind. So for that you need to develop writing proficiency because you ultimately need to publish papers and also go into conference and give talks. So as you keep doing it you just becomes a natural habit to you these writing and communication skills. Now these were some of the transferable skills which are the so called soft skills. There are again the hard skills like data analysis skills or say programming skills which are again very specific to the kind of study you are doing. So that again you can transfer it to your next job if you don't want to remain in academia or research setting. And these are some things which you can hope to gain while doing a PhD. One thing which a lot of people ask me who want to do a PhD is how to look for a PhD position because it can often come out to be very overwhelming. So much of information out there so much of work to do and a lot of people don't know what to look for where to look for. So for that reason I kept a very small slide with a few pointers which actually helped me to find a PhD position and I would like to share them with you. So the most important thing according to me is before searching for a PhD position is to identify what you are really interested in. Because you'll be doing this for the next three to five years and possibly even after that. And therefore it is really really important that you are you like this subject. You are interested in doing this for a extended period of time. And after you have identified that interest I would recommend you to start this PhD search really early because there are a lot of things you need to keep into consideration. First there are different procedures for different countries like in India you need to qualify in a few centralized exams conducted by UGC such as UGC net or gate etc. And only after that you can be qualified to sit for a PhD interview. Similarly in the US if you want to do a PhD in the US you need to look at different universities and different graduate schools and their criteria. You need to look at the strict application deadlines because once you fail to meet those application deadlines then you have to wait for the next year which is again not desirable and so on and so forth. Again like in Europe there are two kinds of PhD which you can do. So in Europe PhD is often seen as a full-time employment. So you can just apply as a job to a PhD with a few motivation letter or research statement, recommendation letters etc. And then there are again other types of PhDs which are graduate school like PhDs which are most common in the US. So you need to look at all these and decide where you want to apply which is the best fit for you. Third there is finding a supervisor in your preferred field. This will again take time because you need to find a person who does exactly what you want to do and who will also be a good fit for you to work with. Then there are again some PhDs which don't come with full funding. So you might need to apply for a scholarship for those kind of PhDs and those take time as well. So keeping all these things in mind you should really start your PhD search early and wait before the deadlines. Along with these search I would also recommend to talk to your professors and other current PhD students because they are really the experts in the field and they would know what to look for and where to look for. Some might even suggest you a good supervisor. So it's always a good thing to ask the experts in the field before going in the field. And last but not the least I would say be prepared for rejection because the key here is to keep applying and not get demotivated because of a few rejections. Because rejections will come because a lot of people are applying and if you just apply to one or two places the probability of you getting there will be slim. So just keep applying and have a positive outlook. Next to the career and research opportunities after PhD. Well of course you guessed it the most common is academia. So after PhD generally people go to work as a research scientist in a university or as a postdoc. Some people might also opt for teaching at an undergraduate institution and then again you can also apply for a faculty position directly which might be a bit tough to get. But it's not uncommon. Next is applying for a job in the industry. With these big companies starting research projects it's not difficult to get a post as a research scientist at one of these companies in your field of interest. You can also work as a business consultant and I know a lot of PhD students have also started their own startups and become an entrepreneur. So these are things you can do after a PhD. Next you can also apply in government sector. For example work as a research scientist in government laboratories like ISRO or DRDO or even work as an advisor to policy makers. And then there are other options like science communications and science journalism and then whatever you wish to do. It won't really close any doors for you PhD. It's just opening a lot of avenues. Now to go into a few misconceptions about PhD. The first one is PhD can only lead to a career in academia. I think this misconception probably I cleared in the previous slide and convinced you that PhD can lead to all sorts of career opportunities and not just academia and university research. Next is you should be in the lab all day and night. Yes. So this is a bad misconception that a PhD student is always in the lab doing the research has no social life and so on and so forth. That's not really true. Because you choose your time of work and often the deadlines are something which you set and you need them. So it's not really like that. Next is you must have completely new ideas to commence your research. Again, it is impossible to have completely new ideas to start a research. What you'll do is build up on previous ideas and then find your way from it and then push it a bit forward. No one's asking you in your PhD to have like phenomenal work like Nobel Prize worthy work. That's not generally the case that doesn't happen. Next is yes, this is also something which I heard a lot is that you think you're too old to start a PhD. See if someone has worked in the industry for a few years and they have interest in going into research, but they think that they are too old to start a research at this age. But that's not true. I have seen people starting their PhD at age of 40 or 50 and doing really good at it. My opinion on this is that it's never too late to start a PhD. And it's as long as you know what you are signing up for and what you are expecting from it, it's never too late. Now that I have talked about the factual details of PhD and what to expect from it and hopefully clear a few misconceptions, let's talk about a very important issue that is the gender gap in scientific career. Here we see a graph from the UNESCO for Women in Science Forum published in 2017, which shows the increasing gender gap in scientific research as with the increase in education level. So here at the high school level, we see that it's almost equal with a huge drop at the bachelor's level for scientific career. Then again for the drop of the PhD level, which keeps on dropping with only 11% of people at the top academic positions and as we all know, only 3% of scientific noble prices for women. Now I would ask you to look at this graph really closely and see the problem here at the bachelor's and PhD level. We see that women consider like consistently that the number of women to pursue a scientific career at the bachelor's and PhD level is considerably lower than their male counterparts. And this is probably one of the reasons why the number of women in tech companies are also quite low and the proper training and education is not completed here. And this can be attributed to a lot of societal and cultural stereotypes of pursuing a scientific career for women. And I think we need to change the mentality of family and society as a general and teach people as to the capabilities of women and what they can bring to the table as scientists or science educators. And I think there also needs to be a robust government initiative to encourage women to actively participate and pursue science and only then we can hope to bridge this huge gap between men and women in scientific career. With this, I come to the end of my presentation. I hope I could pick some interest in your mind about PhD and research in general. Do let me know if you have any questions and thank you. Thank you, Pycon India for having me. Thank you, Ananya for this wonderful session. We do have a few questions. I'll just be putting them up on the screen in a bit. Okay, so we have one so far. Is there any list of universities or colleges for PhD? Any ranking of colleges are subsequent questions? Yes. So there are these two famous organizations which runs universities. I think one is the Times Higher Education List and the other is the QS University Ranking List. So you can follow them and see which are the best universities around the world for the particular discipline that you would like to conduct your research in and then choose the university and the graduate school from there. But my personal opinion would be to choose a proper lab first and then go for the university ranking because that is much more important than a overall university ranking. Thanks. I think this is an interesting one. So someone has anonymously asked, can you share your PhD experience? How many did you give and what is your success rate? Right. So I was mainly applying for my PhD in Europe and mainly targeting Germany per se. So in Germany, like I mentioned, there are two types of PhD. One is the graduate school type, which are quite few. And the majority of PhDs are advertised positions like job positions. So like we need a PhD candidate and you can apply if you meet these criteria. So I was applying for both of them and the success rate actually is quite low, to be honest. There is another way of applying for PhD as well, which is directly emailing the supervisor with whom you would like to work and ask if they have a position if they would like to supervise you. So that success rate is really, really low. If you send 10 emails, you might get response from two from them. One might say, okay, let's have an interview or so. That's the success rate you should be accustomed to. So for me, I applied to this graduate school, which had a two step application procedure. First is I had to send all my documents along with a motivation letter, a cover letter, a small research statement and recommendation letters. And if they like all these documents, then I would be qualified to the interview phase. So I qualified that and the interview phase was a five part interview phase. Like I had to have interview with five professors and all of them should agree to take me to the graduate school. So that was a bit scary for me because you have to convince five people together. But overall, I think what they are looking for is how much you know from your masters or bachelors and how much are you willing to put forward to your PhD and whether you are a good fit for the lab. So just be yourself and don't try to convince them something which you are not. And I think it'll be fine. I hope I answered all your questions. Fine, Sananya, I think there's one more question which could be a follow up for this one as well. So it's like while applying for PhD, I was told it is better to initiate a conversation with the professor or mentor. If they don't reply to your emails, how many times do you really pursue? Before applying, Max? Yes, I don't think you should pursue it that much because in my experience, if a person is really having resource, because you see to give you a position, they need to have funding because you can't do a PhD without a salary, right? It's not possible. So if they have funding and if they think your profile fits with the lab, they do reply. So maybe twice or three times Max should be good to pursue. After that, you should really start applying to other places and seek other professors as mentors. Great, thanks. Yeah, the next question is how do I prepare for a PhD interview? Well, so see the interviews at different places are conducted very differently. For example, what I heard from a few of my peers who were applying in India, sometimes it is very knowledge based. Like you have to solve stuff like in front of the interviewers and from your master's level or your bachelor's level. In my experience, applying in Europe, it's mostly focused on my master's thesis, like what work I did, how I overcome any difficulties that I had in those work and if I know all the technical specifications of my work. So it's really focused on what I did and what I know rather than overall knowledge of the field, right? So preparation of an interview should be very focused on where you are sitting for the interview. That would be my suggestion. Thanks. Since you brought up PhD in India, there's one question related to that. So what is your opinion about PhDs in India? What do you mean opinion? Well, for me, I think PhDs in India sometimes might take a bit longer. But there are really good research institutes in India where really robust research takes place like ISCs, IITs and the TIFRs. So for doing PhD in India, PhD in general, you should really look at the lab, what the output of the lab is and how the research environment of the lab is. And that's all that matters to a PhD. Thanks. There's another question on, so Angad Gupta has asked, motivation and recommendation letters from industries, is it acceptable while applying for your PhD? So the motivation letter is something which you need to write. Recommendation letters, I think graduate schools have the different graduate schools have the different requirements for who can write a recommendation letter. Often it's mostly people who are in academia that recommend you, but if you are in an industry setting where you did research or research internship, then those recommendations are also valid. Thanks. Okay. We are on the top of the hour. Maybe we can take one last question and then folks, the rest of you can ask a question on the stage 5 stream, Ananya would be there hanging in. So just one last question from, what are the prerequisites to do PhD in India, I mean in terms of education? So this depends on which subject you want to do a PhD in. For example, if you want to do a PhD in engineering, then a bachelor's degree with a good gate score is often a bachelor's degree with, I think, seven GPA or something. It varies from institution to institution, but just about as in a BTEC plus a gate score is good enough to qualify for a PhD. Of course, you need to crack the interview as well. For other subjects say like neuroscience or economics, those subjects. I think a master's degree plus a UGC net qualification is important because gate or UGC net, these are the agencies which would be providing your PhD funding. So you need to qualify that to get a monthly stipend for your PhD. Thanks. Before we close the session, so a word of appreciation from Harbinder Singh. He says thanks, Ananya, I really appreciate that. Thanks Harbinder Singh. So thank you all for joining the session.