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.

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.

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.

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.

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…!”