Mission:- How to make ISI better?

An evil plan, I say! Here is an outline (Kindly drop-in your suggestions) :-
1) I make loads of money.
2) Mathew and Sid also make loads of money. So do others who wish to move to jobs.
3) 10 years down the line, pool in cash and start a separate institute. Same entrance procedure. Start with only undergrad.
4) Provide better salary to lecturers. And, MUCH BETTER stipends to students.
5) Offer more flexibility to students in choosing their specialization viz pure/app maths, comp sc, stat, physics.
6) Arrange for them to receive excellent tutoring from other colleges as well , if needed.
7) Work along CMI lines and have an industry sponsored comp sc and applied maths departments (which will also ensure students have places to consider once they finish undergrad)
8) Use our contacts and encourage students to take up internships and gain work-experience.
9) Again pulling strings to place students with the best of the firms here or abroad (By that time, we probably be in a decent position in some firm ourselves - maybe partners :P)
10) It will be hard to implement it for first couple of years but once people start getting placed, the rest will fall in place. The entire motive is to provide a suitable environment to both - the ones who wish to be researchers and the once who wish to move to industry. And, a very suitable one as well!
11) I believe that our batch-mates/seniors/juniors/their contacts would be willing to join the place for we will ensure an environment conducive to fruitful research :)
11) But then we put money in it! What do we get out of it? :) It will be a totally dumb-ass move not to have a way to make more cash out of our cash. I have a plan. Somewhat. But not a good idea to put it on the blog.

So yeah! Thats a sort-of vague plan. I am sure, things will change over time. We will be able to improve on it. Maybe change a few things here and there. But this is the basic skeleton. And, I am not being altruistic. Its just a way to give students a better platform AND make money for ourselves.

On PhD

Not much to say! We have a reputation when it comes to manufacturing mathematicians. For starters, I would suggest this link from Vipul Naik's homepage. Vipul has a very descriptive style of writing and he provides useful links as well. So, shouldn't be a problem. This page here talks about the basic stuff grad schools look for and basic details about GRE, TOEFL etc.

For a list of Unis offering PhD programs in Mathematics, click here!

For an insight into grad life, click here!

Cheers!
Shivam

On ISI and ₤$€

This post is a compare-and-contrast between Indian Statistical Institute - Bangalore and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE ≡ ₤$€).
[The writer of this post has a B-Math (Hons) degree from the former institution and hopes to have an MSc in Applicable Mathematics degree from the latter by this year end.]
The possible destinations for a B-Math student would be Masters in - Applicable Mathematics, Statistics, Risk and Stochastics, Operations Research, Operations Research (Decision Sciences). Nothing is stopping one from applying for a degree in Economics/Finance but, I think, B-Math does enough to ensure that one will not think about these options when one is applying.
I, being a Dept of Math student @ The LSE, will talk about the MSc - App. Maths course only. The details about other courses can be provided on request.
So, here goes...

To begin with, there is a lot of differences between living in Central London and living in Muthurai Nagar and, beleive-it-or-not, these factors do have an immense effect on your academic performance! So, its a bit difficult to point out all the causes, their interdependence and the overall effect. I shall point out two concrete ones:-

Standard of teaching:- Click here! The standard of teaching varies immensely over departments and within the departments. One advantage that ISI has is one can walk into a prof's room anytime and ask doubts. Here, you get one hour per week. The coursework is presented in the form of lcetures and classes. "Lecture" means the professor coming and well...lecturing! Hand-outs and assignment sheets are distributed. Be prepared to meet a guy whose accent you cant make sense of or who is too lost to pay attention to what the students are talking about. The "classes" where assignment sheets are discussed, are a platform to discuss ideas and so on. But, not very helpful. But, of course, some of the teachers are simply brilliant. So, the deal is how will one know who is good and who is not? Well... Here, you have almost a month to decide on your course. During that period, you can go and attend lectures by various professors and make up your mind, which I would say is not too bad. The only thing is, level might go down gradually as the term progresses. In fact, do not be surprised if you end up wasting one hour of your class-time learning differentiation-by-first-principle (That after you have just covered Ito-integrals in the previous lecture) The level of studets varies immensely depending on the country and background they are from.
In short, its all about what you make out of the opportunities. Make an aware decision, decide what you want from the course and degree and after that, things aren't difficult at all. (DO NOT join LSE if you wish to take up research in pure mathematics. Go to Imperial Maths Department!)

Extra-Curricular Activities:- There are a lot more opportunities to gain experience. Various student socities organize a variety of programs (from cultural shows to business games to enterprenual challenges) and its upto students to participate in them. This is one of the major deciding factors in job-selection procedure. The companies have no place for plain nerds. One has to excel in different walks and demonstrate diversity and excellence. The international student body and the diversity of opportunities that one offers are an excellent platform to learn a few improtant things like team-skills, communication-skills etc which go a long way in helping one survive in a global business scenario.

Most probably, an ISI student will have trouble adjusting for first couple of months, but, if one chooses to, one can have the time of one's life and take away certain things one is bound to miss out on having spent one's undergraduate years in an elite-yet-isolated institute like ISI. Such a role-change is definitely challenging, but, after spending one - term at this college, I would say, its worth it! And, definitely interesting as well :)

Cheers!
Shivam

What is Mathematics??

I really really wonder what everyone else here thinks mathematics is all about. Engineers actually think mathematics is about integrating polynomials while economics students think mathematics is all about finding the derivatove of polynomials. No one can beat the professor though. He is solid IKR type. Bstat, Mstat bugger, you think he knows something ..... but no. He first says that exponential density function is a*e^(-ax) . He then says that the distribution is 1 - e ^(-ax). Then someone asks him how to prove it (an IIT fellow) and so the prof says "Proving this is out of the syllabus for your course." So the IIT fellow asks if he can tell us how to prove it anyway and the prof then says "I'll think about it and tell you how to do it tomorrow."

Everything in our mathematics class is like this. We get assignments every week where we need to use Baye's theorem to calculate a 9x45 matrix using an excel sheet. He actually said that he can prove central limit theorem using an excel sheet. So i ask him how....im very surprised.....so he says just add a random variable approximately thousand times, then generate 1000 points from the random variable obtained and plot it on a graph and it obviously follows normal distribution....therefore proved.

What a chooth.