The logistical pressures of moving countries and cities – from London to Calcutta – and a nasty bout of flu meant that it was sensible to stay offline for a while.

Over the next few blogs I will seek to provide an overview of the educational climate in India, and the extent to which international alliances are changing or are likely to change the university experience .

Why are British universities seeking to find a presence in India?

The Indian government has plans to increase the number of university goers from a current 12 per cent of the population to 30 per cent. In plain terms this works out to a present university student population of 12 million, and a projected increase to 30 million. This is clearly a very ambitious plan and opinions are mixed as to whether it can or should be achieved.

In this first piece though I want to present a side to the global impact of the ongoing changes in the Indian university system that is seldom seen in the media.

That is, what is the university experience in India from the point of view of the student and the lecturer?

I went to school in Calcutta and also did my first undergraduate degree in the city. When I went to the UK to do my second undergraduate degree it wasn’t the differences in the educational culture that I noticed but rather the continuities. This was probably because both the school and university I attended were established in the nineteenth century when Calcutta was the capital of British India, and at the heart of a close engagement between the cultures of India and of Britain.

What I experienced in India was a meticulousness of detail and depth of approach which I am truly grateful for. Somewhere along the way I also became firmly imbued with the idea that the big picture matters. So valuing the humanities was important because it helped one to link the puzzle pieces of the world together.

A common expectation and hope amongst the educational community in India is, I think, that alliances with British or other overseas universities will mean more flexibility for students and teaching staff. By which I mean exposure to the arts, sciences and perhaps even technical knowledges together. It seems rather harsh to expect an eighteen year old to choose a “stream” and stand by it life-long.

A simple scan-through of the weekly educational supplement to the Kolkata edition of The Times of India gives a thumbnail picture of the kinds of degrees and career pathways being offered to current undergraduates. Management and science degrees predominate but there’s a wide range of IT -related and engineering courses, along with intriguingly specialist courses in things like wine-making, chocolate making and magicianship (though not at Hogwarts).

What I wonder as a global citizen and a teacher is this – how are we going to help students join the dots? Will the view that learning has value in and of itself because it nurtures creative and critical thinking hold in the new university environment being fashioned?

This wider view of the meaning and value of education already has a space both in India and in the UK. But I have also experienced the piece meal view – in both countries – that being educated in order to find and keep a job is all that’s needed.

It’s an interesting time to be in education – and I hope in succeeding pieces to chronicle more of the changes taking place. The future – not just for the UK and India but for the world – looks an utterly different place than most would have imagined it a mere ten years ago.

Also – a very happy women’s day to everybody from both Ritu and I.

Priyali: I know you’ve been travelling internationally to complete work contracts. How do you go about finding openings? Do you use an agency or is it down to your own research, and how do you decide who is a good employer?

Ritu: I maintain an extensive professional network through writing, reading and research. I make prospective employers aware of my work and establish a continuing dialogue to contribute significantly towards health, social research and policy. This also helps me to find and select the kinds of projects I am keen to work on.

Priyali: You are someone who grew up in India but now lives in the UK, and has spent some of her most formative years within it. Do you feel you have access to more than one culture, and does this make you attractive to prospective employers?

Ritu: When people ask I often say I was brought up in England. I have certainly established “belongingness” here in Britain. I feel very much part of its society and environment. I think the experience of working in two different nations and understanding how things get done, certainly benefits in maintaining contacts and sustaining networks. I have access to wide networks here and in India. We live in a globalized world and also an extremely competitive one. With people now having access to specific geographical locations they didn’t have before, they are presented with new challenges and dynamics. These present difficulties but can be dealt with successfully.

Priyali: This is your free space – go ahead and send a message out to other researchers, practitioners and readers of this blog as to what most engages you at this point in your life and career.

Ritu: I feel that universities should prepare PhD students, who often live an isolated life, for the outside world. They should encourage them to publish and provide continued support even after they graduate. Most PhD students feel misplaced and choose different career paths, due to little or no guidance or support from their universities. It’s even more difficult for migrants who would like to establish their careers outside their home country.

Also, I would like to add that Britain needs to rethink its position on international development. I feel that Britain’s capacity to make a difference in the developing world is huge. This needs to be planned carefully by considering intersections of race, gender and social inclusion.

People belonging to diverse backgrounds should be given opportunities to contribute to the international development sector through an equitable manner and process. This will help deal with issues of social exclusion within the UK that give rise to inequalities in the work environment.

I think he meant by this that there is a craft and a science to producing that finished piece of work, whatever the discipline.  When the moment comes that you submit, defend and are finally awarded a doctorate by your examiners, you are being recognized as a worthy peer by the academy.

What is it then in your hands to do with the piece of work you have invested several years of your life in?

Publication – yes, but in what form and with whom? I was approached shortly after being awarded my doctorate by a company that wanted to publish my thesis. However, they did not have a peer review process. A friend of mine was similarly approached, and accepted. But she is a communications professional. The value of having her work out in book form supercedes the necessity of peer review. For someone like me who is building a career in scholarship, peer review makes the difference between work that will stand me in good stead when being considered for a lectureship, and work that may not carry so much weight.

How do you find the right publisher and the right audience for your work? Who will hold the copyright and for how long? How long will it take to appear in print?

To all researchers – please consider this an open call to write in with publication questions and answers. The greater our knowledge, the better our decisions.

As an Indian citizen who spends significant time living and working in the UK, I have been able to witness at first hand the changes taking place in the education sectors of both countries.

The Indian economy like the Chinese economy is expanding. India, like China, is investing heavily in education. New schools and universities are being founded at a steady rate.

British universities are looking to these two countries for expansion. The universities of Liverpool and Nottingham have already set up joint programmes and campuses in Xi’an Jiatong and Ningbo respectively.

I recently attended a meeting at which a reputed British university presented plans for a joint doctoral programme, to a group of senior faculty representing a number of established Indian universities. If the plan goes ahead, students will be able to show joint accreditation for their doctorates. Since a large part of the programme would be based in India, where both living expenses and tuition fees are significantly lower than in Britain, the overall cost of the doctorate would be reduced. A senior figure at the meeting remarked on the possibility that this could work not only in favour of Indian students seeking a UK degree – but also in favour of UK students wanting to cut down on university expenses.

I should mention of course that faculty at wellknown universities in India as with their counterparts in Britain, are highly distinguished. Students from both countries who are able to enroll  on such a programme should it go ahead, would also have that advantage on their side.

Are we going to see British students no longer simply taking a gap year in India but living and studying there in significant numbers? What will this mean for teaching methods, curricula and  – that impossible-to-define, mythical beast – global consciousness?

Is your department or university considering a move East?  If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts and expectations with reference to that?

However, citation software is far from perfect, and I’ve ended up with information all over the place because there’s no one tool that can pull everything together for me.

Here’s what I want to be able to do:
— input data via my smartphone, the web and offline on my laptop
— use sources ranging from Amazon and Primo (my institution’s library catalogue) to scanning the barcode of a book/inputting the ISBN
— organise references in the usual folder structure (again on web, app and desktop)
— search, tag, flag and annotate
— export, email, share
— at the click of a button, output an comprehensive and perfectly formatted bibliography which adheres to my department’s specified style (which may need tweaking from the standard)
— be free, or really worth the money!

Actually…that is quite a lot to ask, isn’t it! This kind of software purports to make it easy, but I’ve found it far from.

The main academic tools with both web and desktop facilities are EndNote and Mendeley. There are loads of other options, including LaTex which is for scientific researchers. After some testing — and frustration — I’m using Mendeley as my main tool.

Below, I describe my workflow. I hope it helps someone else who is looking at the jumble of offerings and wondering where to start.

From the library catalogue I save things into my eShelf and export to EndNote Web. I don’t have EndNote desktop, because I object to having to pay for software that they give on-campus students for nothing (I can’t afford to live on campus!), there is no ‘App for that’ and I just don’t like the user experience.

The Amazon iPhone app will scan barcodes and bring up the item; I then put that into a WishList and use Primo to quickly find the bibliographic data that I need, export it to EndNote web, export from there and import to Mendeley. Yeah, a massive pain!

I can also scan barcodes on MyBib (a $2.99 app) then send via email for import to Mendeley — but I can’t get that to work at present.

From the web, there is a bookmarklet I use to send things straight to Mendeley, and the list of possibilities there is impressive, including just clipping web pages. EndNote has a Firefox toolbar, a whole toolbar stuck onto Firefox for just three buttons — online help, an EndNote Web bookmark and a Capture bookmarklet. Clumsy, ugly and disabled.

Within Mendeley I can do everything I want — reading, annotating, grouping etc. The EndNote experience just wasn’t as seamless, although I think it does do all or most of the above.

The only thing I can’t do easily is the barcode scanning, so I will have to use Primo ISBN searches instead, via Safari on the iPhone (ugh, maybe it’s time for Dolphin).

Another thing I like is the sharing and collaboration possibilities of Mendeley’s social media link-in, although currently there’s not much in my field. With things like academia.edu and LinkedIn’s great groups out there as well, I have to see how things go there, but Mendeley seems pretty innovative.

This is a very personal ramble about bibliographic and citation software. I am rather disappointed that there isn’t a tool that will combine what I see as all the essential and fairly basic requirements for academics.

For something less personal, have a look at this extremely comprehensive comparison of free bibliographic managers.

For now, I will continue with my rather convoluted scheme of record-keeping! How does everyone else cope with the endless referencing and record-keeping nightmare?

In my last post I looked at the issue of teaching modules which may seem to be at some distance from the discipline in which you did your research.

From amongst a wide circle of friends and colleagues who are both research active and teaching-active – to coin a new phrase – I’d say it’s extremely important to acknowledge that flexibility is both a personal and professional good. A friend who was awarded her doctorate in 2006 found a permanent teaching post within twelve months of completing. Her lectureship was not in History which was her “home” discipline if you like but in Criminology – she was able to develop a subsidiary interest into one which she could use as a foundation for her career.

In my present teaching post where the focus is on English for Academic Purposes, language and study skills  although I am not teaching literature, I find myself drawing upon my doctoral research constantly. Accuracy, structure and space for the imagination – are the three things I would name as the basis of every class I teach.

To put it another way – the proof of the research commitment is in the teaching practice.

Here’s to all researchers and teachers, as they seek to bring two worlds together : ).

I found I needed a way to keep track of characters and locations, and linear text files were getting too messy. I’m writing a novel set in the world of surfing, and the mixture of real, semi-real and totally made up beaches is a nightmare to keep track of, let alone all the different characters. So, although I’m firmly a lists sort of person, I’m trying out some mind-mapping software. I’m using iThoughts, an app for the iPhone (and iPad), which has pretty good reviews on the App Store.

As my novel grows and changes, it’s great to have a map of characters, because I can group and link them in accordance with their relationships to others and see it all at a glance. If I need to remind myself what a particular minor character looks like, where someone’s nickname has come from or who only ever wears black, it’s there in the notes.

I also have a node for non-characters — names I would like to use, little characteristics or personality traits that I would like to incorporate somewhere. Then if I have a new character come into the story, I can draw on this well of half-formed ideas. (That way those little scraps of ideas don’t get lost or wasted!)

iThoughts can export to loads of formats; I just grabbed the first free desktop software that it was compatible with, FreeMind. MyMind and MindNode are also recommended (by my brother, who uses it on his education course). A desktop version means I can see my maps on a bigger screen with all the nodes expanded and notes in a more readable size. I can also print it out and take it to supervisor meetings, which helps both of us.

Some other uses I can think of for this software are:
- plot structuring
- brainstorming scenes
- what if? testing of scenarios

It’s also really handy for doing a quick bit of work when you don’t have time or opportunity to do any ‘real’ writing. I can play around with the colours and associations, add a few notes, do a quick character or location sketch, or just enjoy looking at the world of my novel, laid out on my phone in pretty colours with bubbles and icons.

If you know of any good mind-mapping techniques or software, please post them in the comments. I’m new to this and would love more ideas on how to take advantage of it!

Being a bit of a writer, and therefore a lot of a reader, I naturally turned to books to help me, and I found that there weren’t a lot around. There are plenty of books on how to get your PhD, but not so many on how to get onto one in the first place!

So here’s a recommendation for anyone preparing to unleash their brilliant research proposal on unsuspecting profs: The PhD Application Handbook by UK researcher Peter J Bentley, which has nearly 200 pages of invaluable advice.

This book is useful for prospective researchers in all disciplines, with a wide range of examples given. It’s really easy to read, and absolutely fascinating. Suddenly I knew the answers to some of the questions I dared not ask — how not to annoy the departmental secretaries or any of my prospective supervisors, who to approach first, how long to wait before enquiring about my application and so on.

I would recommend starting at the beginning and working through. You may want to skip the ‘Why do you want to do a PhD?’ part, but these are the questions the uni will ask, so be sure you really do know! There is tons of funding information, which will be invaluable for most students.

Personally, I found the chapter on preparing my application the most helpful, but the book is full of insights which will ensure that you present yourself as well as you possibly can. It also goes further than the application, holding your hand all the way through securing the offer, finding accommodation and some solid advice on beginning your PhD.

If you are wondering what it’s all about, you’ll feel much more confident with this book (and the Jobs.ac.uk PhD blogs!) to help you.