For Current/Prospective Students

For current students

Plagiarism policy

On the first instance of misconduct involving plagiarism, please assume that I will have no further professional collaboration with you.

For recommendation letters

In most cases, I would be more than happy to write a personalized recommendation letter for your job/graduate school applications. I prefer to write blind recommendations (i.e., letters to be sent directly to the concerned person) than to hand them over to a student. 

Before contacting me for a recommendation letter, please answer these questions:

a) Have you taken at least 2 of my courses?

b) Have you done any long-term (> 1 year) projects with me or have you published a paper with me?

c) Have you done any short-term (6 months - 1 year) projects with me and taken at least 1 of my courses?

If your answer to all of the questions is "no", then my advice would be to not ask me for a recommendation letter. In particular, for such a case, my recommendation may hurt your application.

For scientific writing

Tips on writing papers with mathematical content.

How to know whether your PhD is going well

A PhD is a long journey. You are being trained in research practices of academic writing, scientific communication, documentation, and research methodology. At the end of your PhD program, you are supposed to know much more as compared to me in the chosen topic of your thesis. Typically your PhD with me will comprise of three phases after you complete your coursework starting from 'T' (date of commencement of the program).

(1) First phase (typically until T + 2 years): I introduce you to a problem statement that is of mutual interest to us and is based on the coursework that you have done. I also provide the complete direction in which you could proceed to solve the problem. I will check your derivations and analysis thoroughly. We will see the necessary research communication needed - patents and publications. I will help you write your first paper, i.e., go through the paper line-by-line, highlight best practices of academic writing and common mistakes we do while writing our first paper. It is imparative that you take a note of all this carefully.

(2) Second phase (typically until T+3 years ): We discuss together the outcomes of the first phase and formulate a research question together. Here I will take more of an advisory role than a supervisory role. I may direct you towards the tools and solutions that may be needed to formulate and solve the formulated problem. We will have discussions on your derivations and the results. I will not be deriving the result for you but definitely check the correctness of them. In case of mistakes, rather than pointing them out directly, I will be nudging you towards solving them on your own. You will write your patent application (if needed) and the corresponding paper. I will give editorial inputs on improving the paper and discuss how to present the paper in a better manner.

(3) Third phase (typically until T + 4 years): Based on the inputs of the first and the second phase, the third phase is where I learn from you. You are supposed to formulate your own research problem and convince me about the novelty and need for solving the problem. We will meet once you have the problem formulation ready. We will meet next, when you have preliminary results which you can discuss with me so that I learn something new. Then, we will meet when you have exhaustively analyzed the research problem, written a manuscript which I can then review.

You can judge for yourself your progress as per the above timeline regarding the "quantity" of your progress.

Regarding the "quality" of your work: I generally have around 4-5 invited talks in a year (sometimes more). In case I am selecting your work to present during those invited talks, you are progressing well in terms of quality. Our work together should be exiting enough for me to want to present to our peers and colleagues.