Never Forget Your Roots

The other day I received a comment on my first post regarding graduate education. It read, "one of the points that you have not considered is the Industrial PhD alternative". To be honest, I was taken aback. Being a PhD student myself, I have never heard about this. I decided to do a google search and ended up with a couple of universities that offer such a program. Interesting, I thought. What took me even more by surprise is that the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (DASTI, Denmark) has been offering such a scheme for over 40 years. The European Union has formally announced that it would launch what is called European Industrial Doctorate (EID) with an initial funding of 20 million Euro. You can read more about this news here . So what is this Industrial PhD all about .? As defined by the Denmark Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, it is a business-oriented PhD wherein, the research project is conducted in joint collaboration with an ind...

A recent analysis of current trend of graduate education among freshers shows a sharp increase in the number of students who have set graduate education as their top priority goal. For the sake of clarification, I should explain that freshers refer to bachelors degree holders less than about 5 years experience and graduate education refer to Masters or a PhD course. The analysis is referring to students in the engineering streams. Does this trend indicate youngsters being more interested in developing higher intellect or motivated towards research? Or is there something else that is trending? In my opinion, there are a couple of reasons I can think of, that might explain this increased interest in higher degree courses: Recession / Global Meltdown : It is a time when no one is certain, how long you are going to have your job. The probability that your boss might shut the doors upon you tomorrow morning is more than a mere threat. The only area which hasn't been much af...