Attractions of faculty jobs at IITs, IIMs, IISERs/NISER, IISc, etc.
IISc Bangalore faculty Prof. Abi has a nice article on this in the IIT Kharagpur student magazine Scholar’s avenue. Following are some excerpts arranged as bullet points.
- Salary: Going by the present, post-SPC salaries, you’ll start as an assistant professor at Rs. 6 lakhs, at the end of your career, you’ll be at over 12 lakhs.
- ‘benefits’: allowances (house rent, transport, telephone and internet), social security contributions (pension or provident funds, career-end bonus, etc) and perks (medical insurance, leave travel concession, for example). The value of these benefits could easily exceed 50 percent of the salary.
- consulting: It can give you the satisfaction of solving some real world problems. It can be a great source of ideas for long term research. Most importantly, it also has the highly desirable property of giving you some extra cash!
- IIX salary is not only fully protected, it’ll also (a) keep up with inflation, (b) keep rising (through annual increments) and (c) see substantial jumps every decade or so. To sweeten things even more, IITs are planning to introduce incentives to reward extraordinary performance (and I’m sure other IIXs will follow suit).
- As an IIX faculty member, you’ll enjoy a couple of features that are not available to engineers and managers in industry (in both public and public sectors): two (or even three) months off every summer and a one-year sabbatical leave every seven years.
- As an IIX faculty member — and this may come as a surprise to you — you’ll also enjoy certain advantages over faculty in US universities.
- First, you don’t have to pay your graduate students, the government pays them.
- More importantly, the same research idea has a far higher probability of getting funded in India than in the US. This means that you’ll spend more of your time on actually doing research, than on writing grant applications seeking that ever-elusive funding.
- Finally, the autonomy, the choice and the flexibility: As an IIX faculty member, you’ll probably spend 30 to 40 percent of your time in teaching and related activities. The remaining time is yours, and yours alone — nobody tells you how to spend it. You could use it for research (for getting peer recognition), teaching (for your students’ adulation), and consulting (for money, and collaboration with industrial partners). There are other academic pursuits as well: writing books and popular science articles, teaching kids in local schools and colleges, learning about new and emerging fields, etc.
1 comment November 2nd, 2009
