NCBS selections

Sorry for the late post, but my days get more and more packed with activities...

May 20-23, the NCBS ran interviews to select new PhD candidates for the upcoming academic year, and I was involved as a volunteer to accompany and to help the candidates. That gave me a good opportunity to learn more about the NCBS (get into touch with the other volunteers and the professors) and about the different places in India from which the candidates came.
The candidates selected for the interviews (120 out of 6000 applications!) were split to 5 panels, each panel consisted of three professors. In this first oral selection round, each candidate had an interview of 20 min (in total interviews took about 1.5 days). 44 from 120 were selected for the second and final interview round, in which the interview lasted for 50 min in front of a new panel of three professors (another 1.5 days). The interviews ended on a friday afternoon, and the candidates could check on saturday morning, who was one of the lucky to be selected. Finally, ten candidates made it (i.e. a selection rate of 10/6000 = 0.0017 = 0.17% !).


During the whole procedure, the participants had a great catering for lunch and coffe/tea breaks, and on saturday noon all candidates of the 2nd round were invited to a lunch together with the faculty. During this saturday lunch, I discussed with some of the professors about the interviews and the selection procedure. In the 1st round interviews, candidates were asked general questions about biology, mathematics/logics, physics. But the the professors did not care about precise values or explanations learned by heart. They were interested in the candidates capabilities to explore an indea, to reason and to argue. The second round of interviews was more concentrated to the research proposal that the candidates had written in their application. Again, the questions were not about knowing established things, but about how the candidate wants to explore and realize his project. What could they imagine to do, how to encounter problems, how to proceed if the research aim is accomplished?
Regarding the big number of candidates and the little number of accepted people, I asked whether the selection is difficult or not. Interestingly, the professors told me that it is not too difficult to identify the special/ interesting candidates they are looking for. There is also no strict limitation, how many candidates can be accepted. In the previous selection, finally 20 people were selected.
I think, I understand better now, what kind of place the NCBS is. I like their philosophy not to select candidates for a specific project, but for the NCBS (the candidates visit at least three labs before deciding what to do). The people here all went through such a selection process, which explains the high number of excellent, interesting and free minded fellows. And corresponding to the comments of many candidates and professors, there are not many other Indian institutes with this concept.


The candidates came from all over India, some of them had a train trip of two days (trains are not very fast in India, even a fast train has an average speed of 70 km/h), and some were accompanied by their parents which had to wait all the time in the main hall. To distract and to calm the candidates before the interviews, I chatted with them. Like this, I could get impressions of several places in India, which sites I have to visit, what kind of food they have etc. Some even thought about a PhD in Germany and asked me about the live there. From the selected ones, I had the pleasure to talk to two of them during the procedure, but I hope that the others which were not selected will find good places for their PhD, too.