BALAJI RAMASUBRAMANIANgraduated from N.S.I.T. in 2004 and worked for several years in the semiconductor industry before going into research. Here he gives some valuable and detailed advice to those thinking of pursuing research in the US.

1.Please describe in brief your career path leading to your present position?
After graduating from N.S.I.T. in summer 2004, I worked with Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductors and AMD. In the fall of 2008, I joined graduate school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Illinois).

2.What embarked your interest towards career in research?

I want to earn a PhD, join academia and solve fundamental problems. My interest in research burgeoned in part through work at N.S.I.T., industry exposure and participation at International conferences.


3.What is it like working in your area of research, and what are the future prospects in this direction?

It is a very satisfying experience to be involved in active research and solving fundamental problems that have never been solved. My research is in the area of device physics and nanotechnology. This involves a lot of solid state physics and thermodynamics. It is of interest, only in the developed world and a few of the developing nations. In Asia, the best research institutions are in Japan, Israel and Singapore. In India, as far as I know, only IISc, TIFR and IIT Bombay have any significant research facilities in this area.


4.How has been/was your experience at graduate school?

I enjoy grad school because I love research. Grad school is an extremely intensive research program. You should know where your heart lies – don’t go by peers or parents. It is not advisable to join grad school just for an MS degree. MS programs in Stanford and Caltech are not research programs. They extort their MS, BS and MBA students to pay their PhD students. In Berkeley, Illinois and MIT there are no distinct MS programs. Graduate admissions here are made only to PhD programs; though they don’t say that on their websites.


5.Factor(s) you think influenced your admission into graduate school and how supportive had N.S.I.T. been in helping you achieve your target.

a) I had very good professors that very graciously wrote letters of recommendation on my behalf. Prof. H Parthasarathy and Prof. R Senani played a very crucial role. Some erstwhile teachers of N.S.I.T. like Dr. R K Sharma (now at AIT) also helped. Visiting professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and Fellow at ST Microelectronics Dr. K Saha also wrote letters on my behalf. I also got excellent advice from IEEE Fellows Dr. Paine Chao and Dr. Mark Seidel.


b) I had worked hard to publish/present papers in international conferences. Good schools like Illinois, Berkeley and Stanford don’t admit if you have not published in an international forum/ conference/ journal like IEEE.


c) My grades were reasonably good.


d) The good networking skills I had developed in industry were of

great value to me.


6.What are the emerging fields of research that students should explore?

Every field is interesting and no research area is superior to others. I think students and professors should collaborate with world-renowned professors/ scientists in top schools, industry or in DRDO/ISRO, keep a watch on the state of the art and publish in journals/ conferences. We have to be realistic and not expect NSIT to be like Berkeley or Illinois, but can surely try to be like the IITs. The American academic system is designed to foster research and most of it is funded by DOD, DARPA, NASA and NSF for military and space research. But in India, even the best schools do not collaborate with DRDO/ISRO – there is in fact no incentive to do so because of the bureaucracy. Collaboration is important because today is not the era of Newton who invented calculus on his own.However India stands a distinct advantage over the rest of the developing and third world. Engineering and Science are taught in English. This puts us at an [unfair] advantage over even some excellent schools in Europe/Asia/Africa; we can publish in Nature, Science, APL, J of Appl. Phys., Phys. Rev.,J of Comp. Math., IEEE, ACM, ASME etc. which are all in English. Reading these journals is the best way to find the state of the art in research.


7.Please describe a typical day at work and what do you do when you are not at work?

I work almost every day, but I balance it between work, fitness and cooking/socializing. My weekly calendar has appointments, paper/conference deadlines, classes, homework, fabrication, simulations, measurements, literature research, peer reviewing, etc. A graduate student’s position is a job and we have formal appointment letters, work permit requirements, responsibilities, deliverables, deadlines, research goals and also annual salary reviews.


8.Opportunities you would suggest to students interested in MS/Research?

Research assistantship positions in IITs or IISc could be of value to gain exposure to research. An MSc at IISc, IIT Kharagpur or TIFR are top research programs in India. Some programs at IIT Bombay are offered in collaboration with National University of Singapore (NUS) in which student can use research facilities at both universities.

Some of the good engineering research universities outside the US and India include Univ. of Cambridge, EPFL, Univ. of Toronto, NUS, Max Planck Institute, Nanyang Technological Univ. (NTU), Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Imperial College of London. Stanford, Illinois, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Cornell, Purdue, Princeton and UT Austin are the top US schools in engineering. Carnegie Mellon Univ. (CMU) is known only for Computer Sciences. Beware of US News rankings; Americans employ the best marketing agents.

Working in industry in India can give a good perspective of the world and a mature outlook towards research. However, if you are research oriented you should have a clear plan of joining grad school afterwards. If you are serious about research you should apply for a PhD program.


9.Some books/movies/music that have inspired you and would recommend?

“Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman”, by R P Feynman; “Pirates of the Silicon Valley”; “A Beautiful mind”.


10.Please feel free to provide any additional information here.

I know a lot of people that spend their parents’ money to pay tuition for a few semesters before getting an appointment with the department. Some even go to third-grade universities in the US mortgaging their property only to get a degree that would never get them a job. Do yourself a favor please: work hard during your undergraduate – it pays. Take GATE and join the IITs or IISc if you do not get an admission with full financial cover to the top schools in the US. Even NUS and NTU admit students based on GATE scores, often with complete financial cover. There is no absolute need to go to the US - this is not heaven and is surely not the only place for cutting-edge research. If you get a PhD from some of the top Asian schools, you will easily get a post-doctoral scientist’s position in the top research labs in the world. Even most PhD programs in the US prefer master’s degree holders from top Indian universities. Working in industry helps, if you do something substantial. Vegetating in some company with no productivity is not going to be beneficial. An engineering job in industry has no research component at all. It is very easy to fall into the money trap in industry. Most people in industry eventually want to become managers and/or get an MBA. This is not bad as long as you are not forced into such career decisions by circumstances. A finance consultant or a marketing manager’s position will often not pay you as much as an engineering job. A manager’s job is not a “settled” life. Indians often think so because most of us have seen our fathers get into a finance/marketing job and imagine that they lead a very “settled” life. To most Indians therefore, a manager’s job is a mark of “settling” in life.Did you know that the financial analyst is the first one to be fired in a recession? .In a recession a person with an MS degree risks losing his job because he has only a marginal qualification higher than a bachelor’s degree and does nothing better than a BS/BE/BTech graduate. This is not true with a PhD – companies want to keep their doctoral scientists.A fresh PhD graduate joining as an assistant professor in the US is paid salaries in the top 90th percentile of all US salaries. The smartest PhD students are in academic positions in top schools. Academia is a very good option for young budding scientists, in terms of salary and work-satisfaction. Many professors at Berkeley, Illinois and Stanford held positions in industry and spin-off profitable start-ups from their research.