A student who passed out from our college couple of years back, came to meet me the other day. He said he had finished his MSc in Organic Chemistry from one of the smaller universities in Maharashtra,
"Good to see you. So what are you planning to do now?"
"I wish to get into drug design, but I am not getting an opening in that area. I have a few offers for QC work, but my prof said I should do drug design."
"Good to see you are clear about what you want to do, but since you say you need a job urgently, why don't you take up the QC job and then shift to a drug design job whenever you get an opening?"
"No ma'm my prof said I must not take up QC jobs but must get into drug design"
"OK, that's good if you are so passionate about it, you must stick to it. What is it about drug design that you like?"
"Oh you know, like parenterals, formulations etc what we were taught in BSc"..he said this condescendingly to me ...as if he was enlightening me on the concept of drug design.
I was speechless after that.
Maybe he thought that drug design is making nice designs on capsules....shall we make the chloramphenicol pink and blue instead of the horrible green................The story is really tragic. We give very high degrees to students and make them believe they are now experts in the area of study. We do not give them any basic training in the subject, and worse, we do not evoke in them any desire to learn further.
Many students who are now pursuing a post graduate degree in state universities believe that since they have cleared the PG entrance exams, they are now experts. Their confidence in themselves is very high...much higher than what I had when I was 22. Is this a good thing or not? I am unable to decide.
Their confidence is really misplaced and prevents them from learning more. But on the other hand, lack of confidence is paralysing and leads to a lot of bad career choices.
4 comments:
we get many of those as a master or graduate student, it takes while for them to accept that they need to learn many things and accepts that they don't know everything in order to be useful for a research project, but eventually it works. We Indian have self inflated egos which comes either from ignorance or a complex. Biggest problem is from people who have a degree from one of those IIXs institute. They think they are the biggest experts in the world since they have IIX degree and many a time refuse to learn.
When you encounter such overconfident post grads, what do you feel you have to do, as someone who can see much further... ?
I usually don't do anything. It's very difficult for anyone at that age to change their version of who they are; and in some ways, being overconfident is better than lacking confidence. What I think is that at a much younger age children should be exposed to sources of knowledge that gives them a glimpse of how much there is to know. I always go back to the same point...improve school education and higher ed will follow.
@RS, I don't tink pg s from IIX are all conceited. I am one of them and my problem was that I was always painfully aware of how much I did not know.
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