Exploring Life Through Science

It startles me to see an article that draws an analogy between the cobra effect and academia - Interesting parallels. The emphasis on - how metrics like impact factor, h-index, grants, and tenure tracks have overshadowed the purpose of doing science is the central point of discussion. Towards the end, the article leaves you with a question of where collectively restructuring is required to enable real progress. But, how to do that? In other words, how to resurrect the dying "soul" of academia and get over "pretentious" science? Here are my thoughts: I think the answer lies in where it all started. Ask oneself the following question- What enabled the concept of doing a Ph.D.? Back in the day, the excitement to understand takes the front seat, which has been instrumental in the pursuit to discover things, and the by-product of this process is a Ph.D. What's happening now? Vice versa? Relatively speaking, we have reached a stage where every lab is equipped with en

It’s been sometime into my Ph.D. – a roller coaster of emotions – last of the phrases that could sum up my journey. Before I delve more into it, the pandemic toppled my health, like any other, and found it incredibly difficult getting back to normalcy. Although, I tend to stray away from repenting on that, and perhaps wearing it like armor helped me to move forward. On the other hand, during the pandemic, I researched more on why people started the concept of a Ph.D. and what it takes to be a Ph.D. student. As far as my understanding goes, it’s a framework designed to study the observations that were made, and obtain a structure while understanding nature’s play. In fact, I also thought more about the expansion – The Doctorate of Philosophy, and that gave me a profound sense of a gap. The framework has been quite instrumental in amassing your thoughts and connecting the dots with the observations. The gap that haunts me - the advent of peer-reviewed journals, tenure tracks, and things

Why do we need this? All the Aspiring Researchers out there! This is posted by keeping all the undergrads in mind.  Most of the Undergrads work in a project where PI drives the idea and we work mainly to execute them in the lab (Of Course, there is nothing wrong about it). Ever wondered how satisfying it is to execute your own idea? The ideas/interests that we might have accumulated over time are very vague or not concrete enough to execute them. I hope you can relate to this. I was thinking of a forum/platform where we can devote our time exclusively to build an idea (of someone) based on papers they might have read or the field that we are interested in. Building an idea takes time for anyone! If we try to put in cumulative efforts (different perspectives can help maybe!) solely to construct an idea of anyone, I think it would be great. This could also lead to the emergence of new ideas! The bottomline : Narrowing down to a specific idea and learn to frame hypothesis. Strategy (maybe