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Building a research network as a new faculty member.what actually works (69)

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Manipal Academy of Higher Education · Posted
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The honest answer to 'is a PhD worth it in India in 2025'

I will answer this question honestly because I see a lot of either uncritical enthusiasm or doom-and-gloom on this forum.

A PhD is worth it if:

  • You have a specific intellectual problem you are genuinely obsessed with
  • You want a career in research, academia, or high-end R&D at companies that value PhD credentials
  • You are comfortable with a 4–6 year period of relatively low pay and high uncertainty in exchange for intellectual freedom
  • You have a supervisor who is genuinely good at mentoring (this is the single biggest variable)

A PhD is probably not worth it if:

  • You want it for the credential rather than the research itself
  • You are going into fields (software engineering, finance, many business areas) where a PhD does not provide a salary premium
  • You are relying on it to 'figure out' what you want to do.that is what a master's degree is for

The Indian academic job market is brutal. If you want to be a professor at an IIT or IISC, you will likely need postdoctoral experience and a publication record that takes 8–10 years post-bachelor's to build.

But if research is genuinely what you want to do.it is absolutely worth it.

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14 Replies

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Deepa Krishnamurthy Distinguished 810 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Meena Sharma · Accepted answer

I have a slightly different take from my experience in industry research. The reproducibility crisis is real but unevenly distributed. Fields with strong engineering culture (computational biology, ML with benchmarks) have actually improved significantly in the last 5 years. The bigger problem is in fields where data sharing is structurally difficult.clinical medicine, behavioral economics.

The ML community's move toward open code and reproducibility checklists has been genuinely effective.

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Sowmya Narayanan Active 310 pts · Accepted answer

If you are not already using a reading group format with your students, I would strongly recommend it. Forces everyone to articulate what they read.

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Replying to Sowmya Narayanan
test tester Growing 165 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

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Chetan Jain Growing 100 pts · Accepted answer

I found that writing a paper abstract first (before the paper) and then reverse-engineering the paper from the abstract helped with clarity enormously.

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Chirag Mehta Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.

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Prakash Iyer Distinguished 640 pts · Accepted answer

Just to make sure I understand the Zotero workflow correctly.is the .bib file synced to Overleaf automatically every time you add a new paper, or do you need to trigger an export manually?

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Replying to Prakash Iyer
Shiva Prasad Active 480 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

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Wajid Khan Growing 110 pts · Accepted answer

For longitudinal data with missing values, mixed-effects models handle this more gracefully than imputation in most cases.

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Replying to Wajid Khan
Neha Agarwal Growing 90 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Uday Bose Starting 5 pts · Accepted answer

CSIR-UGC NET preparation: past papers are the most important resource. Everything else is secondary.

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Farhan Mirza · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.

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Replying to Sanjay Kumar
Manish Tiwari Starting 10 pts · Accepted answer

This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.