Research Assistantship/Internship after your undergraduate studies (story of RA detour from University of Waterloo to IIIT hyderabad leading to a publication at BITS)

 

Feeling under confident while applying for Masters/PhD? Should you get an year's research experience before it? Where to pursue it and to what extent does it help?

Well, I will share my experience on this so that you can relate your situation well and can plan accordingly seeing the suggestions mentioned in this post.

Hello Everyone!

I am Ruchik Mishra. I am an alumni of BITS, Pilani, Hyderabad Campus. I did my B.E (Hons.) in Manufacturing Engineering where I was mostly into research in the field of robotics. After my undergraduate studies, I worked as a Research Assistant(RA) at the Robotics Research Centre at the International Institute it Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) for a year. I will be joining the University of Kentucky as a PhD student from Spring 2021.

Here is a really simple diagram to explain what research is, pretty clear right? Well, this my perception of what research is but there can be a number of ways you can interpret it. 

In this post, I will discuss in detail about how your research experience can help you shape your career. Not to forget that these are my personal experiences and can differ from person to person. But, you can get an essence of what generally happens in research and how relevant it is to get some research experience after your undergraduate study.

 

Common Reasons for opting for an RA

There can be a number of reasons how pursuing your Research Assistantship/Internship can help you. I have placed them in three broad categories:

Compensation

This is one of the most common reasons for going for an year's RA before applying for higher studies. A lot of times universities have a criteria that just leaves you thinking whether you have enough credentials that can possibly fetch you an admit. It can be issues related to your overall and subject grades, lack of research experience or publications, lack of good recommendations, not so matching curriculum or lack of relevant courses that are a pre-requisite for the Masters/PhD program. 

Now, you cannot improve/change the static elements like your grades, courses that you have already done but can compensate with other important factors like your research experience, fetching good recommendations from your mentor or even proving that you are good at the skills that the university is looking for in a graduate student. It doesn't always work out as some universities are staunch when it comes to grades and the relevant courses, but there are a lot of universities in the world where you can make an impact.   

Adding up to your skills or research experience before grad school

This is the second most common reason why people opt for an RA. As soon as you enter your graduate school, you will have a number of things to do starting from your course work to managing yourself in a completely new environment. Soon enough, you will have to prepare for internship opportunities for the summers. Doing an RA helps you there. You basically have an entire year to hone your skills in your area of interest without course work or any other commitment that might divert you from your work. So, that will help you get than edge over others while in your graduate school.

In terms of research, you will be able to become more mature as a researcher. You will not only get an experience of working on a research project from a technical perspective, but also learn what it takes to work as a full time researcher. This will help you set your priorities for your future goals. 

Changing your area of research/study

If your field of study or area of research are different from what you intend to pursue in your grad school or further in your career, you should definitely opt for an RA. It will help you not only understand the field better but also give you a clarity whether you actually want to change your field of study. Secondly, your credibility towards the subject will go up. 

In this case, you might have to gain multiple years of research experience to be credible enough to switch fields and publish good quality papers to convince the universities that you are capable enough to successfully fulfill the grad school requirements. 

 

Where to apply? 

This is one of the frequently asked questions by people who plan to do an RA after their undergraduate. There are two broad and obvious categories that we can talk about.

RA in India

See, there are pros and cons to everything. There are some good universities in India that provide you great opportunities of research and you can genuinely learn a lot from the profs there. Let's evaluate what are the pros of doing an RA in India. 

• Easy to appear for GRE and TOEFL/IELTS when you are in India. Its not necessary that it becomes easy, but its always more comfortable since you are familiar with things.
• Preparing your documents. There will be a lot of scenarios where you might want to get some documents from your university to submit for the application. This sounds a small issue, but it is not. I was in Hyderabad during my RA, so it was always easy to go to BITS Hyderabad and get a document if it was critically required.
• There will be a number of people at the university where you intend to work, who might be applying for their graduate studies. So, it always helps to interact and decide with like minded people to choose universities, evaluate your profile and discuss the pros and cons. Also, you get updates from anything that is specific to Indian students from your peers.

RA abroad

It surely is a great opportunity to get a paid research position abroad at universities that have world class facilities and do really unique research. So, you can try for them similar to the procedure that I have mentioned in my previous blog post. Now there are a number of things to analyze before you do that.

If you intend to do a Masters/PhD at the same university after your RA:

 Choose your options wisely if you fall in this category. If you do not have a Masters degree or are not enrolled in a Masters program, you won't get a PhD opportunity in Europe. Almost all universities in Europe require the candidate to be a Masters degree holder in order for him/her to get enrolled in a PhD program. The same goes with the Masters program also. Almost all the universities in Europe see the basic requirements that they expect their students to have like grades, relevance of your undergraduate degree and other academic performance. Some places in Europe can be too CGPA centric (saying this from my personal experience. I did my thesis at Politecnico di Milano but my application for masters got rejected twice because my undergraduate study was in a different field than what I had opted for although all of my research was in the field that I was applying for). US universities have the option of accepting students for PhD programs directly after their Bachelors. So, do not forget to check the requirements.

Problems that you can face:

The most common problem that most of the people face even though the prof is ready to accept them for a paid position is 'VISA issues'. These problems arise because you won't be a student of any university once you graduate from college and hence you cannot go one a student visa. This is the root cause of the problem and most of the RA opportunities get cancelled at the last moment. So, if you get an acceptance from a university abroad, don't rely completely on that opportunity. Create a backup opportunity in India too. It is always safe. 

My experience of looking for RA Opportunity

I was looking for opportunities abroad in robotics and related fields. As usual, I had mailed a number of professors asking for opportunities in their research group. After mailing, around 600 profs, I finally got my first funded opportunity at the University of Waterloo. The prof had agreed to pay me for an year's work at his lab. The conversation went for around a month regarding the formalities that had to be completed. One day I received a mail from the professor saying that the immigration officer has pointed out a few problems with my eligibility. He said since I wasn't a student anymore at any university, he won't be able to call me because of visa issues. And this happened after a month and half of the acceptance when I thought everything was all set to start. Meanwhile, when problems started arising, I also tried making a backup in India. This is how I ended up taking an RA opportunity at IIIT Hyderabad.

Now, this came as a boon in disguise. Since, I was in the same city as BITS, I could also take care of the project that I was working on in BITS in my final semester. There were a few things remaining after which we could submit it for a conference. So, I got new insights after starting my work at IIIT. I carried on with my work at BITS also and I was successfully able to submit the work in an IEEE International Conference and it got accepted too. So, not all detours are bad.  There is always a glimmer of hope in every opportunity that you get. All you need to do is use your resources judiciously.

 

What to expect from an RA or what to do as an RA

As I had discussed earlier, RA is a learning experience to hone your skills and broaden your horizon about research since it is a full time opportunity. So, how do you go about making sure that you make the most out of this experience. 

• First of all, if you have joined at a place where you have never worked before, don't get in a hurry to publish papers unless you are told to do so. According to my experience, what you need to do is get familiar with the nature of the work that the lab does. Publishing a paper during you RA is important without doubt, but has to be planned in a proper way rather than working in an unorganized manner. Don't go for a work that has short term benefits that might fetch you an authorship in a paper. But, it won't really help if you cannot justify it properly. But do not forget to make your intentions clear to the prof that you are interested in publishing papers.
  

• Make sure your prof likes your work. Mostly you might not have a paper while submitting your applications for higher studies. In that case, your professor vouching for you in a Letter of Recommendation will become crucial. So, in any case, do not piss off the prof. 

• Increase/sharpen your skill set as much as you can. Now this has multiple advantages apart from giving you the satisfaction of knowing it.  If you are applying for a PhD program, you will have to appear for interviews in front of profs who you want to work with. So, the better knowledge you have of your work, the better you can explain and defend yourself as to why you can be a good fit for their research group. 

• Sometimes your work in the lab gets too monotonic and you might get bored on a number of occasions. You can still use the time in a productive way. Find out the papers that the lab has already published and that interest you the most. There is a good chance that the students who worked on it are still in the lab. So, try implementing the paper that you have read on the level of simulations if you can or at least read the important concepts that might give you an insight of a new project. And the best part is if you have any doubts, you can ask the people who wrote it.     

• The above will broaden your understanding of the subject and will also help you while you are writing your Statement of Purpose as you know what interests you and can talk about the technicalities too.

Note: If you do not intend to stay/apply at the university where you intend to do your RA, make sure you do not get consumed too much in the process. What I mean to say is, while it is important to do good research, it is also important to understand that if you wish to apply elsewhere, you should know where to stop getting too much involved at your current place. While it can be a debatable topic, this is what I feel personally. 

 

About publishing papers

If your target is a PhD after your Bachelor studies under a professor who is renowned for his/her work in the research community, you need to make sure that apart from you excellent academic record, you have a good record of publishing papers. What do I mean by good papers? Well every conference has an h5-index which says how famous/important the conference is in your field. Here is a link to google metrics where you can find this. There are other websites too, but I generally prefer seeing this. In my field i.e. robotics, the conference with the highest h5-index is ICRA (IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation) which has an h5-index of 94. So we compare accordingly the other conferences in the list. For robotics folks, I will mention some good conferences that you can try publishing in: ICRA, IROS, AAMAS, ACC, ECC, HRI etc. You can find more from the website. Also, there are lot of journals that you can publish to and compare their relevance from their Impact factors from others in the relevant field. 

 

In conclusion, I would like to mention that the number of years of doing an RA depends on what you feel your situation is. Assess your situation well, take suggestions from others but decide for yourself. There are students I know who have worked as an RA for more than a year after their Bachelor's degree and have landed up in good research jobs in the US and others who got into good universities. 

Coming up:

• My story of getting in to a PhD program after my Bachelor studies and an year of RA.
  
• Suggestions for undergraduate students (for all years) on what they can do when they are in college so as to maximize their output and not feel worried later while applying for thesis/Masters/PhD.

 

Till then Good luck and let me know in the comments if you want me to post about anything specific. All the best!

 

Acknowledgement:

I would like to thank Dr. Pallavi Saxena for helping me to write this post and investing her valuable time.