As I mentioned in my previous post, How to choose a good place for PhD, I mentioned that the first and foremost criteria for choosing a place is Professor and lab. These two things guarantee a good PhD work and a strong career afterwards. If you don’t understand this and plan well you may land into a messy situation and finally end up hating your work and the place you joined for PhD.
IIT and PhD have been a blessing for me. Though, I never thought and know why I am going there and which lab I am going to join. Later after working in industry for couple of years and kind of academic project we give to professors, I realized the importance of Professor and lab for over all personal growth.
If you analyze all great guys running the industry and technology belong common parents in education domain. One or the other way they are associated with each other and connected in a sense or other. I am working in medical image reconstruction and I know almost all top guys in that domain. Industry also know their students. Industry would love pick guys they know are leaders in specific domain.
There are few qualities I would love to see in a professor before joining his lab. Please keep in mind that I didn’t follow any of these while looking for PhD, but what did is to choose best professor in the department I joined for PhD. I will share advantages and disadvantages of random selection like mine. What I am mentioning here is based on the experience I have both in academics and industry. I strongly feel that if research is not applied will not be charming for long.
Few basic things great professors and teachers have are.
They are leaders in domain. How do you know they are leaders? Simple based on books and research papers. If a professor is author of a book in some domain, means he know about that field a lot more and can clear your fundamentals about the subject well.
Professors with a focused research interest and labs. All great professors are focused and know what they doing and contributing to. When constantly work for several years in same domain, they know the current issues of the domain, its applications, drawback and direction to solve them. Fundamentally, that means your PhD problem is almost known, and you will learn a great deal with your seniors.
Industry collaboration and adoption of research. Another important thing to look is how much of this research is sponsored by industry (not government) and how active this professor is for industrial research. Industry demands faster and commercial output that lead to smarter deadlines and solving those would help in learning and give a great problem solving skills, eventually lead to great PhD.
Must have a good reputation in department and students working under them. Usually it’s a myth that tough professors are great in research and more knowledgeable. But what I feel great professors work hard and expect you to work hard. Rest they have most of the fun and really appreciate hard working guys and give them PhD as soon as the work is done. Bad professors don’t have good research problems to solve but bring more social problems. A good reputation in department will also help his students in making PhD committees for his students and ease official burden a lot.
I know it’s hard to find such an idle labs for average students. We need to compromise and find labs that goes with the above standards. If you are not confident of doing good research then better to choose and averagely doing lab. Higher labs and people with great work profiles always have higher expectations.
Hope this will help you choosing a great research Professor and lab. I will make few videos on this in coming days. Do subscribe to InI research for more updates. Do like likes us on facebook and follow us on google plus.
First we need to select the college then we can go for selecting the good professor in that institute where we will be doing PhD.
OR
First we will select professor from an institute then we can go for selecting the institute for doing PhD
You can do either. But the best approach is to first select a prof. As you will know what you are going to work upon. Otherwise, people usually land in a situation where they dont know any thing and profs. dont know much either.
Thanks for the suggestion, i know a professor in IISc in Dept of Management Studies so can i choose him as my guide and i can take admission in IIT Karagpur for doing PhD. and what is the process to get admission in the IIT kharagpur and the what is the process to get the scholarship.
i want to know more about the institute MHRD Assistantship which is given by the IIT Roorke and IIT Kharagpur and how much is the duration for the scholarship and the amount will be given. Is CSIR-JRF or UGC-NET valid score is required.
Please reply i need this information since its is not available on the website.
Regards,
Syed Ziaul Mustafa
I am interested in doing research work in Computer Science on “Security on cloud” …Will it be a good topic with a wide scope and a better future..Any other suggestions, please do help me out
Hi
I am interested in prusuing PhD in computer science on “Security on Cloud” …Is this with a wider scope and a better future? Can you please suggest some latest topic for the research work..Other topics that I thought of are,
Corporate information management systems;
Databases and knowledge bases;
Data protection and information security systems and networks;
Information technology in management and systems research;
System analysis, management and information processing (by industry)
Security In Cloud Computing
Database Security
Data Analysis
Cyber Security and Cyber Forensics
Pattern Recognition
Bluetooth Home Automation
The emergence of Agile Software Development
Agile Software development and human aspects of Software Engineering
Energy-aware software systems
Data mining of open source systems
Corporate innovation initiatives and strategies, internal startups and aligment
Innovation in software business – Ideation and innovation processes in the early phase of software development, focusing on the context of software startups
Hi Sir,
You have spoken truly. Keep writing articles for us.
Srilakshmi