I completed my MTech from NIT Trichy in 2022 and have been working in industry since then. I now want to apply for PhD programs, both in India (IISc, IITs) and abroad (ETH, CMU, UW).
Does a two-year industry gap hurt PhD applications significantly? I have:
Would love to hear from people who have successfully navigated this situation.
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When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?
I am in a very similar situation. Would you be willing to share the outline of your PMRF proposal? Not the content.just the section headings and approximate word allocation.
Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.
Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.
Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.
Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.
Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.
I have successfully received PMRF (lateral entry, second year). Happy to share what worked in my proposal.
On the research proposal:
On citations: Yes, cite your MTech thesis. Framing your PhD as an extension of prior work you did shows continuity of thought.
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.
Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.
Thank you! The reference to MuRIL is particularly useful.I had not considered it as an alternative to XLM-R for Indic languages.
This is a known issue with XLM-R on code-mixed data. The MuRIL preprint has a section specifically comparing these.
The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.
This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.
Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.
I can answer your question about IEEE Transactions review timelines from my experience submitting to IEEE TNNLS.
For Q1 IEEE journals, expect:
As for code and data, most IEEE journals now request code upon acceptance, not submission. Regarding your 2.3% improvement.that is borderline. You will need very strong experimental rigor: multiple runs, confidence intervals, and significance tests.
Open access is the right direction but the APCs are prohibitively expensive for many Indian researchers without institutional funding.
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?
Respectfully, I think this framing misses the systemic dimension. Individual researchers cannot solve a collective action problem. If you submit to open-access journals and your colleague submits to Nature, your colleague gets the promotion. Until evaluation criteria change at the institutional level.which requires policy intervention.individual choices have minimal impact.
The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.
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.