Thursday, December 17, 2015

Random thoughts towards completion of my PhD thesis

So, now having finished 5.5 years of my PhD studentship, I am trying to consolidate all the ideas and work into a logical and presentable form for journal papers and thesis. I think any PhD thesis should tend to be a like a subspace, which itself is a vector space (closed under addition and scalar multiplication). It means that every element of the thesis and its combinations should be a part of the thesis.

Updated<08-01-16> So, the course registration for this semester is over and I had a sudden thought whether I should credit any new courses, initiated by the by a new upcoming rule in IISc, that a direct PhD student can get a M.Tech (Research) + PhD degree with a requirement of 21 credits as coursework. Even though I finished the credit requirement with 26 credits, it has been a long duration of 4.5 years since I credited a course. I thought it will be very good and exciting to credit courses. We get the feel of giving exams and assignments/ projects without the pressure of CGPA/ RTP as the  courses credited now will be counted as non-RTP additional courses. I think a research student should credit or be a TA for at least one course every semester so as to keep in touch with basics and learn new subjects helpful for our research. We may think that we can learn on our own through books/ video lectures but crediting and doing the course has a different higher level of commitment and understanding. So, even though I am in the sixth year, I am crediting two courses now.