Introduce yourself

The inter-personal dynamics during the interview of a prospective graduate student can be very entertaining. All that we have is 15 minutes to test the suitability of a candidate for higher studies but we, the selection panel committee members, seem to find every way to spend that time other than doing just that.

The panel members being academics come with various shapes and sizes of egos. Some don't like it if the students understands their question and starts proceeding with the solution without any hand holding from them! So, they move the target immediately or force the student into taking an approach which is the 'scenic way' to the destination. You see we love to mentor people, even if they don't need the (tor)mentoring.

"Are you sure?" as a response to a correct step by the interviewee is a sure way of destabilising his/her progress towards the correct solution. I have never understood why one can't just say "okay, proceed" or consider the option of saying nothing at all.

Nothing brings out more the inter-collegial under-currents than the entry of a promising candidate. Some of the panel members see this as an opportunity to take a dig at each other's research interest. "Oh! You want to work XYZ area? Isn't that too old-fashioned?" And then proceed to hog the questioning time. It has rarely worked in their favour but then.........

More often than not of course it is the interviewee who is so out of depth that the whole interview process reduces to a game of taboo in which the panel members provide all the clues to get that one word that they want to hear about a given problem. It can be quite a comic relief.

Strawberry Cake

Was a bit disappointed that strawberries imparted absolutely no colour to the cake and was wondering if the amount of strawberry I used (3/4 cups of pureed fresh strawberries in a 2 and 3/4 cups of flour cake) was too less. But the cake tasted so darned good, and so flavourful! 

Stale questions

I love November as it comes with 'THE END' of  teaching for the semester. While I love the subject that I taught this semester, it being an under-grad course I had a large class to handle and it was hard to keep it together for the whole semester. It is a little weird that over the years one of the aspects I used to rather enjoy in the beginning of my teaching career has slowly  become something I am finding myself disliking more and more every passing year and that is preparing question papers for exams. God, how I used to sit with various books and come up with each question that would be easy to comprehend but would require good understanding for one to be able to answer all parts of it. Yes, each question used to have at least three parts, two of them would test their basic skills but the third/last part would test their intuitive understanding. In effect I would end up giving my undivided attention to the making of any exam paper a minimum of two to three days! And of course since these problems were all self-made they didn't come with their ready solutions. So another good chunk of time used to go for that. And then I would eagerly wait in anticipation for the exam to get over to take a look at the answer books to see if students got it or not. 

It was of course a lot of fun and excitement at that point in time and I thoroughly enjoyed doing things that way but now things are different. There are so many things I feel committed to that putting in that kind of time and effort seems a complete waste and therefore have resigned to using, god forbid, ready made questions with ready made solutions. Sacrilege!