Summer Internship

Several months before a summer vacation, almost every faculty is flooded with email requests for summer internship.  The volumes are so large and the requests are so generic that I just press delete button on those emails.  This phenomena has led me to write this blog to offer some unsolicited advise to students.
Solving difficult academic problems take a large amount of time, typically extending much longer than three months of summer.  If a person is not trained in an area, he/she may not even be able to start on a problem. This is quite common to my area of research, fluid dynamics and turbulence, which is not covered in normal physics curriculum.  Thus, incentive to offer a single internship appears to be a waste of time for both sides, unless the student wishes to continue to work on a mutually agreed upon  project for a longer time after the start (say the next summer).  Unfortunately, most students work on different problems with different guides every summer, hence get no where in terms of real progress.  
Another important thing that every serious student should do is reading interesting books in summer and winter breaks.  To list a few of the classics: 
  1. One, Two, Three,..Infinity: George Gamow, and other books of Gamow
  2. Men of Mathematics: E.T. Bell
  3. Chaos: James Glick
  4. Feynman lectures in Physics: R. P. Feynman
  5. Character of Physical Laws: R. P. Feynman
  6. How to Solve it: G. Polya
  7. Double Helix: J. D. Watson
  8. Popular science, mathematics, and puzzle books by Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner

Reading these books are much more fruitful as well as enjoyable that doing worthless summer projects.  Of course, reading good fiction and non-fiction books are also very thought provoking.
Given above, a meaningful student research project (including summer) should be done in the local institution with professor who has taught a course.  Thus the student is exposed to topic via the course, and the student can approach the professor anytime.  This kind of work can yield a publication.  In my research group, best undergraduate (UG) projects were done this way and they have yielded  research publications in the process.  I believe this is what the best students do in the western countries do.
It is a common practice at present, especially in India, to send generic and often auto-generated emails to hundreds of researchers across the globe.  Many students want to go abroad just for travel sake.  This trend is giving a bad name to the institute, and it should be avoided.  This is not academics!
I do hope this blog is useful for students while deciding what they should do in their summer breaks.


Comments

Unknown said…
This is exactly what I wanted to tell a friend of mine who recently went on a research intern to Japan using the funds of the prof there(which were clearly a part of the research grant) and then roamed around the country and now he is not into research at all! He is busy taking MBA courses here. It is sad indeed. Very well said.
January 12, 2016 at 4:09 AM
कविता रावत said…
आपको जन्मदिन की बहुत-बहुत हार्दिक शुभकामनाएं!
November 9, 2017 at 10:20 PM
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