Blog

The Downward Spiral

Lately I have been thinking of Abraham Flexner. He wrote the Flexner report – a critical examination of medical education in the US, which had far reaching implications. The physicists amongst us know him better as the establishing director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, bringing together the great minds of Einstein, Goedel,…
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So, you are attending your first conference

What to expect when you have been accepted.

D.A.R ke aage jeet hai*

How to set expectations for new employees, or new research students.

A different kind of leadership

A leader is typically pictured as a person who is a mentor or a coach, looking into the well-being of his or her employees, and leading from the front. But leaders also play another important role – one of keeping the proverbial ship afloat. Two completely different things, requiring different approaches to leadership. When the…
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Keeping track of literature – the Second Brain approach

Whether you are a PhD student, an active researcher, or a final year student researching for their main project, keeping track of literature is key. The availability of modern bibliometric tools like Google Scholar, or Web of Science makes literature discovery easy. A broadband search can yield anywhere between 5K to 50K hits (or worse,…
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The Route to Mastery

Postulating a meta-approach to upskilling for practicing professionals.

Three ways to counter stage fright

In appreciation of Adam Neely’s latest video, and some additional tips.

Implementing Online-Hardware Hybrid Labs

The philosophical underpinnings, reflections from in-class observations, and the full GitHub repository of lab material – for a measurement and instrumentation course designed around the Raspberry Pi platform.

Moral Dichotomies

Some thoughts on Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, The Bomber Mafia.

Overcoming programming aversion via a problem-solving approach

Some reflections on my experiences with helping students develop programming-based problem solving skills in photonics.

CC-BY-NC code examples included!