NIT-Surat Admission Experience for Ph.D

Day by day technical education is improving due to increased eligibility criteria by AICTE for faculty in engineering institutions. Today, premier institutions like IITs and NITs set Ph.D. as the minimum criterion for an assistant professor position. Thus, Ph.D. education is now just for the betterment of engineering education.

I applied for Ph.D. in November 2010 and got the call for an interview in December 2010. This article is about my Ph.D. interview held (27/12/2010) in the Mechanical Engineering Dept. of NIT-SURAT. The panel comprised four members including the Head of the Department. My Proposed work for my Ph.D. was “Design, Development & Investigation of Two-stage pulse tube cryocooler”.

The interview procedure was as under:

• Attendance of all selected candidates.
• Original Document Verification of each candidate appearing for the interview
• Personal Interview (Including PowerPoint Presentation describing the proposed research work and its significance to the engineering world)

As I was the first member to be interviewed, I was quite nervous but the way they started with it, I felt comfortable. The interview started with a brief introduction of mine with qualifications and area of interest in research. Then I was asked to give a presentation related to my past work in M. Tech Mechanical and the future work with the scope on which my Ph.D. work will be based.

I finished the presentation very briefly and it lasted for 5 minutes as they wanted to see only the work which I am going to do in the next following years. The presentation consisted of my qualification, area of interest, the feasibility of research in my area of interest and how I will do the research, and in what systematic procedure.

They asked me the following questions after the presentation:

• Why did you choose the field of your interest (i.e. Cryogenics)? What is the scope after completion of your Ph.D.?
• What is the reason for this particular topic (Two-stage Pulse tube Cryocooler)? Why not similar ones (Stirling, GM) in the same field?
• What is your priority? Work or Ph.D.?

It was a really nice experience to remember for a lifetime.

After a day, the interview result was declared and I was selected for Ph.D. in NIT-SURAT in the Mechanical Engineering Dept.