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Experiences with collaborating with industry on sponsored research projects (87)

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Starting 15 pts 0 followers
Yenepoya (Deemed to be University) · Posted
Cybersecurity

I just finished my PhD defense last week (Computer Science, IIT Madras) and wanted to share some honest reflections while everything is still fresh.

What went well:

  • My advisor was supportive and gave me genuine intellectual freedom
  • The collaborative atmosphere in the lab made the isolation of research more bearable
  • The depth of knowledge I built in my area is something I am genuinely proud of

What was hard:

  • Years 2–3 were brutal. Two major paper rejections triggered serious self-doubt.
  • The PMRF stipend still does not cover Bangalore costs comfortably
  • The academic job market is brutal.I applied to 22 positions and got 3 interviews

Where I am now: Joining a research lab at Microsoft India. Not the faculty position I originally wanted, but I am honestly excited.

Happy to answer questions from PhD students or people considering the PhD path in India.

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6 Replies

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Gopal Naidu · Accepted answer

I think you are conflating two separate problems here. The publish-or-perish culture creates pressure, yes.but the solution is not to criticize researchers who are navigating an unfair system. The real problem is with evaluation committees who treat publication count as a proxy for research quality. Fix the evaluation, and the incentives change.

Also worth noting: open review has been implemented in some fields and has its own problems. It can disadvantage early-career researchers who fear retaliation from senior colleagues they have reviewed critically.

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Replying to Gopal Naidu
Kavitha Subramanian Active 365 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Bhavana Reddy Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

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

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Farhan Mirza · 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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Chetan Jain Growing 100 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

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Hemant Patwa · Accepted answer

The ethics review situation in Indian universities is actually more complex than most people realize.

There is no uniform national framework equivalent to the US Common Rule. Each institution has its own Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) or Institutional Review Board (IRB).

For anonymous survey research with no identifiable data and no vulnerable populations: most Indian IECs would classify this as exempt, but 'exempt' still needs a formal determination from the IEC.it is not self-certifying.

My practical advice: go to your institution's research ethics office now, describe what you did, and request an exempt determination in writing. Better to have documentation than to discover the issue during thesis review.