Branch: Mechanical; Batch: 2017 (Both)
Thesis: TU Darmstadt & IISC (Shreyas & Rutvij respectively)
CGPA: 9.33 & 8.41 (Shreyas & Rutvij respectively)
Extra: Basketball team & Tennis team VC (Shreyas & Rutvij respectively)
Q. How would you describe material science to someone who is completely uninformed?
Material science as a field is very broad. Most of the research is not about fabricating random materials, it's creating materials specific to a certain required application. It’s also not as easy as just making the material either, there’s ways that need to be discovered to improve its effectiveness and make it easier to produce. We are currently trying to find new materials for an energy storage system, and are doing so by employing various computational methods. There's lots of mathematical models you can use in material science to get better results.
Q. What are the major regions of research in Materials Science? What do you think is the scope of this area, moving forward?
If you look at it in a particular way, it has infinite scope. But major areas will always include: biomaterials, energy conversion and storage, batteries, fuel cells, catalysis etc. Then you have electronics, semiconductors, newer types of topological insulators and structural materials like carbon fibers. The scope is always how it can improve on the existing materials that we are using, and the improvement of the procedures that go into making that particular product. The goal of material science is not only finding your materials, but also finding a way to invent and fabricate new materials more easily and efficiently.
Q. Could you tell us about the journey of doing some searching around before ending up on Materials Science?
Mechanical engineering people in general are interested in robotics. I didn’t like the basic course for that, so I didn’t explore that option. By the end of 2-2, we were done with Mechanics of Solids and MDD. So I wanted to get into the designing aspect after that. I approached a professor, took up a project with him which I didn't like all that much. There was then another very new project which didn’t particularly interest me but I wanted to stick with it nonetheless. We both made a decision after having a good project in materials. Materials is completely research based and most of the work will be in the research or developing side. It's not a corporate job. It’s really hard to learn stuff on your own, so it’s better to talk to professors and to just go start trying out projects.
Q. In this world of IT and finance, when was the moment you realized IT and Finance is not my bread. I want to do Material Science. How did you gravitate towards Material Science and find your interest?
Shreyas: We had a CDC on Materials Science during our 2-1. I think the reason why I really liked it was the way it was taught. I used to willingly go to class because I just genuinely thought what he's teaching sounds really interesting to me. I got to work with the same professor on a project later, on energy storage analysis and I realized, “Energy is what I want to do.”
Rutvij: For me, it was somewhat random. I just knew I didn't want to do finance because my brother was in finance. So I just knew I didn't want to do that. And I didn’t hate IT. But I wanted to try everything. I spent the end of the second year looking for something that interests me. Materials Science was not the only thing I tried. But I stumbled upon a good project and continued. By the end of your 2-2, Chemical & mechanical students would have completed the Material Science CDC. This gives a basic insight as to what the field holds and its prospects. In case students find this interesting, you can apply for the minor which is offered to the students at the end of 2-2. By the end of 3-2 you would have finished the 3 CDC’s (Mat Sci, Mat characterization & Mat processing), along with 2 DEL’s in Mat Sci of your choice. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the minor certificate, you would've done the course and they appear on your transcript, but if you are looking to specialize further in this stream, i.e. masters, then having applied for the minor by the end of 2-2 matters a lot.
Q. For a student aspiring to pursue core mechanical engineering, entering their third year, is it bad to not have decided on the specialization?
In the second year, students only get acquainted with the fundamentals of mechanical engineering without actually diving deeper into any of the courses. It’s just touching the different areas that mechanical engineering has a play in. The fact is that you don’t need to choose a specialization before 3-1. Once you study electives and gain more experience, you get a better understanding of how you can make the decision. I chose my specialization after taking electives in material science. The third year is basically when you wade deeper into the waters. I’d say pick up a course that you think you can do, which is perhaps related to a project of yours and see if you like the course or not. If you do like it, then that's step one and you can try digging deeper. If you don’t, you’ve eliminated it right there. That’s a very good way of understanding that you’ve done something and whether you liked it or not.
Q. How has the pandemic affected your research work?
Both of us work on the computational aspect of Materials Science, so there’s almost no issue. It’s just about having a good internet connection and the professors having projects that they’re willing to let you work on because it’s a rather new field.
Q. If one wanted to work on the cutting-edge aspects of their field, would stopping at Masters suffice or would they also have to get a PhD?
If you want to work anywhere cutting edge, you first need to be qualified. You can’t do it right out of bachelors mainly because you will not know enough to work at the very forefront of your field. A PhD is only going to further your chances of getting into it, because you're essentially doing your own independent research. A lot of jobs will need you to have a PhD or at least an MS, it depends on the exact field you’re looking into. If you join the industry after an MS, they might ask you to do a corporate PhD, which is basically a way of offering you to become a researcher with them for three years. There are two broad areas of research, academic and industrial. If you don't do a PhD, you definitely cannot get into academia since professors will let you join their group otherwise. You can get into industry but it’s probably not going to be a very high level job. Also our college doesn't have a bachelor's in material science. So anyone who is doing a minor is going to be at a disadvantage when compared to someone who’s done their MS and PhD when applying for jobs. So the best thing is to further studies in Material Science if you are interested, this added to the minor will definitely help boost your chances.
Q. How does one approach professors for a thesis?
The most important thing about the thesis is to figure out what field you want to work in. It’s not a branch, it’s a particular field. The more specific you are, the better you will know who to apply to. The process of getting a thesis starts with soul searching and figuring out what you want to do, then you have to do a lot of grunt work of shortlisting professors and people you’d like to work with. That’s very time consuming because you’ve to crawl through university pages, which may or may not be very well designed and updated. So you’ll have to do a lot of research and make a list of professors you’d want to email, and you’ll have to start emailing them six to eight months in advance. If you want to go in 4-1, i.e. August, you should probably start sending emails by January. In case you wish to start early, in the summer itself, you should start sending emails in October-November. The earlier you start, the better, because you’d probably have to apply for a visa which can take quite a while. If you’re genuinely sure about the field you wish to work in, stick it out by February because in case you’re not working remotely, three months is tentatively a minimum window you should spare for the visa application process. So if you’re under that, just go for an Indian university, they’re pretty good too. If you’ve been in contact with and worked under them, even BITS professors can connect you to potential professors for an off-campus thesis. You should be well acquainted with the specifics of the work of every professor from your department from the research point of view. It’s very useful to know that because in case you want to go into that field, the respective professor would be the first person you need to contact. If you know professors from an early stage, you’ll realize that they do care for students. Everyone is scared to go and talk to professors because of the misconception that they’d judge you for if you ask for help, while it’s actually the opposite. If you go and discuss with them, they’re always ready to help solve your problems. You must realize that the people who have the most experience on campus are not the seniors, they’re the professors. They might not be like a friend but they’re definitely going to be there for you whenever required. Making a personal connection with professors is going to help a lot because not only will you learn, they have way more reasons and exposure to help you with.
Q. Looking back at your college journey, what do you think are the things you did right, and the ones you regret?
As a student, I don't think you should really regret anything, or think that you did something perfectly. There's always room for improvement. Everyone makes mistakes; you have your bumps along the way and those are necessary in some cases. But what you should always strive to do is keep trying something new. Once you’ve understood something, don’t just stay in your comfort zone but try and do more. It’ll help you see if there's something you'd like better. You won’t get this kind of time again, ever. In any department, there are multiple things that you can do academically. Even in specific areas of research, there are many projects that you can try. And I think as students, we shouldn't restrict ourselves to one or two, we should try at least three or four. One of them will definitely fail, which is fine. I think more people should embrace the fact that you can have a failed project.
I wanted to work with a professor, but he had multiple projects and I chose a project in batteries without actually reading much about all the different projects. Looking back, that was my biggest questionable decision. And for two years I got nothing out of it except reading papers. It’s probably my biggest regret of how I wasted my productivity. But honestly, I still think I managed to get some things out of it. I actually learned a lot because I read a lot and that allowed me to get a thesis with a professor in Germany in batteries. I also learned that having the right mentor can literally change the world for you. If the other person is interested in making sure you're doing the right thing, you're going to grow so much its unreal. And I think that's very important, because you need to actually not be scared of failure to kind of put yourself out there because regardless of whether you fail or not, you're going to learn something. Making that decision of rushing into a project may have seemed like the worst decision of my life looking back. But I feel that if I didn't make that decision, if I’d actually carefully chosen a project, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Just don't let your first error be that I did not attend class, which is a very common mistake. For anyone going into research, please attend classes. Especially for courses like material sciences, which need to be taught and gained experience on by yourself.
Q. Do you have any tips for people who think they’re falling behind the pack?
It takes time to accept that you're not in JEE prep mode anymore. One thing that might help here is prioritizing your battles. Instead of aiming to beat the branch topper in everything, you could only aim to beat them in the courses you like. Just prioritize getting good marks in the course you’re confident in. And if every semester you're doing on average six to seven, there's going to be three to four courses you can pick that you’re good at. In those terms, you just need to focus on getting yourself to an eight or nine in the said courses, which really isn’t hard if you consistently put effort since you're interested in them. Now you can rest easy in the fact that if you do pretty badly in a course, you have these other ones to fall back on. It's just about balance. Balancing can be used for both your courses and your extracurriculars, just make sure you prioritize what you're doing at the given time. Also there’s one thing a lot of people seem to forget, our college is really good. You might’ve been near/at the top at school. Now everyone who was at that sort of position in their respective schools have come together here at BITS. It's not that you're not smart, it’s just that now everybody around you is too. What’s important now is to not let that pull you down. You don't need to compete with anybody and this might sound a little cliché and overused but just try to compete with yourself, try to do better than you did last time. It’s okay if you aren’t doing too well now, a lot of colleges look at your transcript when you go for a Masters. And if they see you’ve been improving over time, they definitely take that into consideration. It's not just who you are at the end of college that matters, it's also how far you've come. Most people put in the work only because that’s the mindset that’s been drilled into them. Doing something ‘productive’ and being competitive only for the sake of being better than your peers is not ideal. Because now you’ll be stuck trying things that other people are doing and have lesser chances of finding something that YOU enjoy. There are certain trends in college which are established based on how previous students have done and that is fine. But whenever you are making a decision, take your own thoughts into consideration as well. “Doing something different is definitely not wrong, you may end up setting the trend for someone else”.
Q. What advice would you give to your juniors in college, year-wise?
Attend classes in the first year. You can experience a significant increase in grades just by attending classes compared to when you didn’t. You should focus on getting out of the JEE mindset, have fun and explore a lot of things. There are a lot of things you should be doing, academics shouldn’t be everything, but make sure to go to classes. You also don’t need to attend every class; attend what you like, that’s fine. First year is actually when you don’t have a ton of assignments or a lot of catching up to do, so trying out some extracurriculars in the evenings is good too. The crux is that you should try to explore as much as you can and part of that exploration involves going to classes. Enjoy your first year and don’t worry about academics too much and try to stay healthy. You also need some sort of social interaction, that’s a huge part of college life, you need to have a really good set of friends. So in the first year, go to classes, explore yourself and maybe try to mingle.
In the second year, focus more on the CDC’s being taught to you. 2-1 is probably a good time to see if anything is likable to you. If you don’t like anything, that’s probably the time to start considering the other things that our college offers. You can change your stream to finance, IT, plus there are a lot of minors you could pursue. 2-1 is the perfect time to start talking to your seniors, see what they’re doing and understand what options are open to you. If you like your CDC’s, you don’t need to focus much on changing your field. But if you don’t, by the end of 2-1, you should probably start thinking about whether you want to change fields. In a nutshell, you should decide if the branch is for you in your 2-1.
However, you cannot make a decision completely in 2-1, you might as well take the entire second year. But what is important then is to talk to seniors, they will give you the best advice and that’s the only way to find out about your stream without actually studying all of it. But don’t start overthinking as soon as the CDC’s begin. You cannot decide what you would want to do an MS/PhD in during your 2-1. That’s just following the crowd, don’t do that. Ask about courses, professors and the projects they're working on. Don't ask about the scope of a different course at a different time. Figure out what you want to do, whether your stream is “calling out to you”, you have the entire second year for that. In 2-2, maybe you can dip your legs in the FOFA or the FODS pool.
Almost everyone gets a free slot in 2-2, try filling it with whatever you think can be your order path. In case you’re not able to take up an elective because you wanted to do a humanities course for fulfilling graduation requirements, that’s okay. But make sure to start having conversations with professors in your department. Third-year is probably a little late for a four-year degree student to start talking to professors. Even if you get started on a project and it doesn’t work out, the good thing is that you worked with a professor and the effort you put in will always make them respect you and they could probably even give you a letter of recommendation if need be.
In the third year, try to start working with professors, establish a personal connection with them. This year is overwhelming for almost everyone, you have to balance a lot of things based on what you’ve picked up in the first two years of your course. You cannot afford to slack off, so figure out a timetable-there’s a right time to do everything. If you’ve formed a habit of attending classes during the day, you wouldn’t have to put in a lot of effort into that in the evenings and you can concentrate on sports, club activities or projects you sign up for. The biggest mistake you could probably do is to try to do too much. What is important is not to do a lot, but to make sure that you do really well in whatever you’re doing. It’s quality over quantity. One thing you need to clearly identify is how much you can actually manage yourself. Take your time to get into the groove. Do not try to over-exhaust yourself, give enough time to each thing.
With the beginning of 3-2, besides academics, you also start thinking about what you want to do after college. Because you’re on campus for only a semester in the fourth year, so your college essentially ends at 3-2 and you need to start thinking about the future. Before midsems of 3-2, you should have a fairly rough idea of how you’re going to handle applications at a later point in your college. You should basically know whether you’re going to do a job after college or go for higher studies. Whether you want to go into research completely, or you want to have the option of a job even though you’re applying for a Master’s - you need to start thinking about it by 3-2. Regarding a thesis, you might have to start a little earlier. But, even if you’re at a later stage, it’s totally fine. You still have more than enough time to figure everything out. Don’t put yourself under pressure in second year. Only in 3-2, questioning your post-graduation seems right.
For those in their fourth year, there’s no particular advice because they’ve lived three years of college already. The only important thing is to not question the choices you’ve made so far. Do not compare yourself to anyone and be confident in yourself. Fourth year will also be the time when you’ll be freed up to write entrance exams like the GRE. It’ll be comparatively difficult during PS or thesis but can be managed in the on-campus semester because you’re most likely to have very few and easy courses. So, it’s more of a life searching thing in the fourth year than anything else. Just think of making your profile better and for whatever you’ve chosen, trust yourself and build whatever you’re building towards.
Fourth year is also when you can actually consider the real options after college. It’s not just a job or an MS. There is a year break, there is a job followed by an MS and there are many such options that come into play. You can take a year off into soul searching, go to Varanasi or somewhere, find religion. And it’s not even a joke, these are things you can actually do. You can take a year off to do a diversity of courses, they’d help you later in life, and even for an MBA.
Provided you’ve done your third year well, fourth year will feel like nothing. It is academically the easiest year in college, but you’ll have to do a lot of questioning about your profile and the future you plan for yourself. At the same time, it is the toughest one in terms of making life decisions. So, don’t waste your fourth year and make decisions with the wisdom you’ve gained in the previous years of your life.
Disclaimer: The points given above are the views and steps taken by the individual. They are not fixed steps and guideline to base your college upon. Our hope is to inspire students so they can take the necessary steps here after. We hope you like it!
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