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.

She is an academic, researcher and activist with substantial experience in gender and human rights issues. She has country knowledge and experience of working in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Serbia, Denmark, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Ritu is a founder and moderator of the South Asian Sexual Health (SASH) Forum and an Editor of the AIDS-ASIA eForum.

She is also the Director of Spatial and Social Development Perspectives – UK.

http://ritumahendru.wordpress.com/about/

http://mishtimli.blogspot.com/

Priyali: Hi Ritu, welcome to the “Let’s Talk” blog which is a platform for people within higher education and those simply interested in it, to talk about the things that concern us.

First off, many congratulations on completing your doctorate in Sociology. Would you like to comment on your early career experiences now that you’ve got it under your belt? What are your career plans, and what do you think of the present job market in the UK and outside it?

Ritu: Thanks Priyali. As you are aware, opportunities for PhD graduates are sporadic. I have not had much success in securing a full time academic position in the UK, something that I was looking forward to after finishing my PhD. However, I have specific engagements with various UK universities. Elsewhere, I am in negotiation with universities to establish international programmes – this is a lengthy and time consuming process.

Preferably, I would like to teach Gender and Public Health from sociological perspectives, and engage myself in social research simultaneously. I do have a company and would like to keep that as a tool to continue my engagement with countries like India, Afghanistan, South Africa etc. It may appear that I am adhering to the doctrine of utilitarianism. However, the job market in the UK is bleak so I have created a job for myself and carved my own path. I am hoping that one day the situation within UK universities will change, and I will have a full-time position at a University here.

Priyali: What or whom do you hope to influence with your work as a social science researcher?

Ritu: I wouldn’t necessarily like to influence anyone. Instead, I would like to facilitate and/or provide space for discussions on the issues of migration, gender and health. This would create knowledge of social marginalization through theoretical and methodological understanding. I am interested in the conceptualisation of diasporas and health and how the two are deeply interlinked. I made initiatives to enable this dialogue and founded SASH – an online forum that attempts to address the sexual health needs of migrants  and diasporic communities in the UK.

Next post: 7 March. Dr. Mahendru comments on being able to work across cultures, and on career planning for doctoral researchers.

In this post I want to talk about the relationship between your research and your teaching.

Researchers may feel that they walk a lonely path – and they do. Research by its nature is an individual and personal activity. It is probably one of few professional career paths in which you are positively encouraged to act on the world around you according to highly personal ideas.

And yet – speaking anecdotally even and only from my own experience of the research world as I know it through departments I have taught at, conferences and impromptu debates around coffee machines (!) – most researchers aren’t by nature disengaged from other people. On the contrary, we seem to be insatiably curious about and interested in other people, or we would not spend large chunks of our lives seeking to add a tiny, original drop to the vast ocean of knowledges man and woman have created together over the centuries.

The good news is that our chosen line of work offers its own way out of the loneliness I think many of us have felt, in our hours and years spent following a research trail.

As teachers, we automatically find a social dimension to our work.

In our classrooms we come up against fresh faces and minds to whom we seek to make our ideas both clear and relevant.

We also find a whole new social dynamic in bringing our research selves into the light of day and into the classroom.

I am presently working on a university language and study skill teaching assignment where it is the meta-skills – to use a word any self respecting dictionary would probably reject on sight – of being a learner (and a teacher) which count. Life in the classroom isn’t about ideas right now – its about ideas about ideas. How to frame, present and deal with an argument. What to do when the Harvard style guide won’t tell you how to cite a completely new kind of source which wasn’t around when it was last revised.

I hope I’ll also have a chance to teach the literary periods I specialized in – but stretching to teach language and study skills is gifting me an important kind of knowledge. The knowledge of social contact – where the work I produced over years spent largely in the company of my own mind is being translated into something immediately and socially valuable.

Be flexible and be open to the opportunities around you – don’t shy away because you think it’s not what you trained to do. Let your research self breathe and your teaching self too – they need to not be frozen into one place and one time in an infinite universe.

To coin a metaphor, it’s rather like preparing a one course meal from the grand banquet you prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime festival. What to put in? More importantly – what to leave out? Most ironically, it is becoming clear to me that this whole process is in a sense the opposite of what it took to produce the thesis itself.

Let me explain with reference to the actual context. As a scholarly writer my great struggle has always been – to find the right design and the right connecting axes for my argument. Structure, structure, structure. Words and ideas rushed in on me  – but the simple and absolute necessity of putting each one in the right place occupied my days and nights.

However that story doesn’t concern us for the purposes of this post – somehow, like other survivors of this marathon, I found a way through this terrain and at an unsuspecting moment reached my destination. Aspects of this journey have been discussed elsewhere on this site by Heather http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/phd-student/2011/06/15/what-makes-a-phd/ and Kat http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/language-and-literature/2011/05/30/world-building-with-mind-mapping/. My own work now is to scale down – to sift through the first chapter of the thesis and produce a unified miniature – something which will tell the reader what I feel it is important for them to know about the forty two year poetic career of my subject:  D.L. Richardson. A British-born poet and teacher who, like many of that generation of Anglo-Indians, lived between nineteenth-century Calcutta and London. The first time around it took me 20,000 words.

Hm.

Well…the FIRST thing I’m doing is to follow my supervisor’s advice to “write what you need to write.” I mean that I’m following the mysterious, rational and more than rational shaping instinct which allowed me to form a view of Richardson’s life in the first place – I’m combing through the chapter and cutting and pasting the sentences and passages which form an outline of his poetic life into a new document. It’s amazing how your focus changes with your word count –like packing a smaller suitcase.

The SECOND thing – is that I’m making space for change. Putting in the final full stop was definitely not the end of my thinking about Richardson, the nineteenth century or the Romantic movement. It was a stage in the development of that thinking, and I would like the finished chapter to reflect that ongoing growth.  Nothing complicated about this – I’m simply adding in new thoughts and ideas as I go along in brackets containing both short, haiku-like questions and long, rambling ones (nothing like the bracket for relieving the military precision of linear sentences, eh?).

The THIRD thing is– carving out and creating time to deal with the copyright permissions I’m going to need to get and the formatting of the chapter in accordance with a new (to me) set of style rules.  

And – finally – given the hours, energy and patience this takes, I make time to remember why I’m doing this. The joy of work can seem very far away after hours at a stretch on my laptop – so I need to remember that ,in fact, I’m recovering – or rather helping to recover – the life and hopes  of a real person. And presenting him to an audience that probably would never otherwise come across his work or feel any relationship to it.

I imagine the headline and tag-line intended to raise hackles, as plenty of readers of The Economist are bound to have a postgraduate degree. Indeed, the comments were closed after 190, and there were five letters to the editor printed in the next edition.

The article covers many of the negative sides of doing a PhD, asserting that ‘Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread.’ Of course, they aren’t going to publish a piece which says how wonderful the system is and how happy all PhD students are, because that would be boring, and untrue! But there is clearly some bias in a piece written by someone who admits they themselves ‘slogged through a largely pointless PhD’ (p. 144).

Naturally universities are making use of postgrads as ’cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour’ — with all the cuts to education budgets, they need to. Internships and a general lack of permanent contracts are becoming very common in other industries, such as the media, where eager young things can be paid less than the minimum wage for the privilege of getting a foot in the door. It is only right that universities make use of the skilled people they have nurtured.

The main thrust of the argument is that there are more PhDs being handed out than there are academic posts. The article acknowledges that not every PhD student wants to become an academic, but insists on pursing this point — maybe to be expected in a magazine called The Economist? In any case, that a PhD doesn’t guarantee a job, academic or otherwise, is fairly obvious, but student numbers continue to rise: ‘Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%’ (p. 142).

The article fails to mention what attracts all these students: access to amazing resources, other researchers, mentors, financial support, and the pleasure of working on something you’re passionate about. As one comment (by Albert Dutch) says, “This is the beauty of a PhD: you love what you do.” (Check out Jobs.ac.uk blogger Heather Doran on this.)

Of course it’s not all pleasure — I have days where I can’t bear to look at my work, I’m living on cash from the odd shift down the pub, staying in a cabin at the bottom of my parents’ drive, and working on a laptop that crashes at least once a day. I looked very hard at all the negatives before deciding to sign up to a PhD — and sign on the dotted line of a rather large loan.

Undergraduate degrees have come in for the same sort of stick as this article gives out, and it filters all the way down to the yearly cries of ‘Exams are too easy these days!’ aimed at GCSEs and A-Levels. Way to cheapen someone’s years of hard work and sense of achievement. We don’t want Mickey-Mouse PhDs, and the difficulties of research means a lot of work on the part of both students and institutions to ensure that they get and deliver excellence.

There’s no guarantee of a great job or better money (and the notes about the narrow gap in salary levels between Masters and PhDs will interest those keen on the money), but students of the calibre needed to succeed in research at a good university can surely be more confident about their prospects.

This is why many universities have research training in things like academic and CV writing, presentations and teamwork — transferable skills which make you valuable in the wider job market. Even without specific training, many of these skills will be gained in the course of doing a PhD.

As one of my research training workshop leaders put it, “Well if you are intending to go into academia, good luck! And make sure you have other options.” His statement was met with wry laughter; much of the negative side of research is well known. If you are thinking of applying and don’t know, grab yourself a book like The PhD Application Handbook by Peter J Bentley.

There’s more to getting a career out of the PhD than simply doing the research — another thing research training often stresses. Researchers should not be isolated. Get out there and network, help in your department, go to conferences, get published — all of which will open up a slew of opportunities. (I’ve met two publishers interested in my work, got the chance to blog here, and had one-on-one tutorials with my favourite author since starting, and none of that came from my department spoon-feeding me).

If the PhD won’t be of any use to you in the career path you are on, if you cannot get onto a good course, can’t get funding or afford to support yourself, don’t do a PhD. This is the common-sense approach. Feel free to ignore it and do a PhD for the love and spend a big wodge of cash if you want to, of course — people definitely do.

The article runs to three pages and I don’t have space to comment on all its assertions, but have a read and see how many times you say, “Yes, but…!”