Charged Minds
Published:
Hello, how you doin? We started this in February when the coronavirus had started to make huge problems and now crusing slowly towards september, another academic semester online avoiding the beautiful campuses many American universities flaunt- the old stones endorning buildings and dorm halls, the pebbled footpaths with giant courtyards in the middle with duck ponds, lakes, waterfalls and even an alligator lake(UFL has that, Virginia Tech decided not to follow suit with a turkey farm!)
However, today my rant is not on whether universities should have animal ponds or not. It’s on the humans who reside here for most of the day- professors.Writitng grant applications, advising grad students, serving on commmittees, teaching classes, doing service work like reviewing tenure applications…the list goes on. These people are often the genius behind research ideas and crunching new ideas on the debris of published old ones. But when a general layman/laywoman imagines a professor, a man with white hair, absent minded is imagined wearing specs and a white labcoat( I don’t know how that stupid labcoat got on the idea train!)
The thing I like the most about a professor is the way he/she is sound of the current research practices in the field. Couple of weeks back, I was reading this post bout Alex Smits, a professor emeritus at Princeton MAE. The post talked about he winning the Batchelor Prize this year- awarded every four years to a distinguished researcher in fluid mehanics. My point of thought went at the article which discusses his pre-faculty life at Melbourne and then as a post-doc at Cambridge DAMTP. His conversations with Fluid mechanics greats like Peter Bradshaw and the great Geroge Batchelor himself- an editor at JFM that time. His work in turbulence even during his undergrad project days at Melbourne. His conversations and his ideas that time about the Princeton superpipe when he was barely 30. The next covers how he developed great ideas about drag reduction and manta ray-inspired propulsion where he collaborated with people outside his field. In the end, he was aksed to say something to young researchers:
“Don’t lose sight of why you got into the field in the first place. Do stuff that you like doing and make room for following your own interests. Oh, and I cannot stress the importance of thinking outside the box. Some of the most creative people in the world are working in turbulence which is what makes it so much fun!
And while this post was great, it made me ponder- Dr. Smits did this around late 20s. Dr. Feynman did his PhD at 24. There are such endless researchers who developed a niche for themselves in their areas before 25. And here I was, 22 fearing if I could qualify in the prelims. I barely read a paper now and then and it set me thinking. Was I doing this correctly? Am I a good researcher? And I feel that doing something like that- publishing something in a good journal and keep it going..that’s how maybe I will matter. To quote Russell Crowe from A Beautiful Mind, “I need to look at the governing dynamics” I want to look at the govenring dynamics- the very nature of turbulence- how I can model it. How I can work out DNS to resolve all the scales in a multiphase flow and show the data, how CFD can look up to experiments neck-to-neck rather than verifying them. That’s what I want to do.
I want to be a top-class researcher with grad students working under me having a great time with me as their eccentric advisor joking around the lab before getting back to business. I want to be the guy in the lab today who is referred to a beginner who wants to know more about turbulence modelling and data assimilation in the lab after the beginner being told- “You go to this Indian guy, Dhruv and he can teach you the beauty of turbulence.”
Well, that’s it for now. See you later!