More on Visa Hassles

So, the last time I wrote about the challenges in figuring out the forms and documents that are required to apply for a Schegen visa. The latest news is I applied for the visa and appeared at the Swiss embassy in Washington DC last week, and today I received my visa. Yayyyyyyy!!! Hopefully, there will be no more immigration hassles before I reach Germany (my first destination in Europe).

The visa interview went rather smoothly. My appointment was at 9:15 am on March 9. I reached the embassy at around half past eight along with Rabih, who is also going to Europe with the Global Perspectives Program (GPP) group. We waited for half an hour before we got inside the embassy. When it was time, they called my name and I went in for the interview. The interview went smoothly in that the officer asked me about my purpose for going to Switzerland (and Europe in general) and how I will fund the trip. They also asked for proofs of my enrollment at Virginia Tech, details about my stay in Europe, and my medical insurance. A complete list of the documents required to obtain a Schengen visa can be found here.

One of the requirements for obtaining tourist visa to visit any Schegen area is that the visitor needs to provide proof of stay in the Schengen area, either in the form of hotel reservations or letter from family or friend that specifies that the visitor will stay with them. I had already gotten the required letter from my friend in Germany but the officer wanted my friend to email the letter directly to them. So, my visa got approved on the condition that the embassy receives a letter from my friend directly.

The next morning, I got an email from the embassy that said my medical insurance for the trip was not adequate as it did not cover the entire duration of the trip, and I needed to purchase another insurance that covers the entire duration of the trip. The university had only purchased insurance for the duration of the GPP program. And the visa officer had earlier told me that they do not accept Aetna, the insurance that I currently have. After spending many hours in figuring out the documents that were required to apply for the visa and traveling to DC, I now had to spend more time in figuring out how to extend my insurance duration. It did take an hour and $60 to get that.

So, each time I apply for visa, the entire process of obtaining the documents and making sure I have all the forms filled up correctly seems more difficult than actually planning the trip abroad. At these times, I really feel jealous of people who can do visa-free travel to most countries. More about that in a later blog.

P.S. 1) I had done a blunder in filling out the visa application form. In the place of birth field, I had filled in Blacksburg and in the country of birth filed, I had written USA. The visa officer corrected that for me.
2) The Swiss embassy had minimal level of security I could have imagined for an embassy. There were no security guards at the entrance.
3) There were no restrooms (for visitors I guess) in the embassy.
4) The visa officer did not take the visa fee from me. She told me that as my purpose of visit is study, I do not need to pay the fee. This is interesting because someone else who is going on the same trip was asked to pay a visa fee of 60 euros.

Trip to Europe and Visa Hassle

The new year brought good news for me in that I was accepted as one of the 15 participants to the Global Perspectives Program (GPP) offered by the Graduate School at Virginia Tech. The trip entails visiting universities in Switzerland, France, and Italy to learn about higher education in those countries. And to add to that joy, the Graduate School pays for most of the trip to minimize the financial burden on students. I assume this learning experience would be one of its kind where one is not only gaining knowledge along with traveling abroad but also having all this experience with minimal cost out of one's pocket. Everything great. But is it?

The first challenge I have been facing is in obtaining the Visa for my travel. Given I am an Indian passport holder, I require a Schengen Visa to go to either Switzerland, France, or Italy. And there are multiple hassles in obtaining any Visa (I have applied and obtained Visa for the USA and Canada in the past).

So my hassles in trying to obtain a Schengen Visa started with finding out the right website to figure out what I need to do in order to apply for the Visa. And it was not easy - there were numerous websites that gave information about which documents I need or how I can apply for the Visa but none of them were official. So, while I had the information, I did not know how much I could believe that information. After talking to many people, I finally found out the website of the Swiss embassy that gave me more legitimate information about what I need to do to get a Schengen Visa.

But my pain did not get over here. Once I figured out which documents I need to apply for a Visa, the list seemed unfair and almost like a nightmare. I am required to provide them with a medical insurance during the period of my stay, which makes sense. But they also require me to get my travel tickets and hotel bookings for my entire stay. The Graduate School has been helpful in getting the tickets and accommodation confirmation well ahead of time, but what do I do for the duration when I travel on my own in Europe? How do I plan a trip so much ahead of time and also get my hotel reservations done? And never to mention that I will have to travel to DC to appear for an in-person interview.

I hope the Visa interview goes smoothly but I sure will write another post about it if it does not. And definitely, I will write more posts about Visa policies across the wold and how it is skewed in favor of "richer" countries.

Till then, Tada!!

From Technology to No Technology

Technology has slowly been entering into multiple aspects of teaching and learning. Classrooms are one such space where people are trying to integrate technology in various ways. Colleges are pushing for the use of technology in classrooms. For example, in 2007, the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech made it mandatory for each incoming freshman to own a tablet-PC. The purpose behind this move was to change the way engineering classes are instructed at the university. However, at the other end, there are professors at various universities who are doing away with the use of electronic gadgets in classrooms. Tal Gross who teaches at Columbia University and Clay Shirky who teaches at New York University recently banned the use of technology in their classrooms.

Tal Gross, who teaches public health at Columbia University recently banned the use of laptops in his classes. He argues when students take notes using laptops in class, given their fast typing abilities, they tend to copy down almost everything that is said in the class. As a result, the classroom does not remain a place for dialogue and conversation anymore, rather it becomes an “exercise in dictation.”

Gross supports his decision by citing a research study conducted by Pam Mueller at Princeton University and Daniel Oppenheimer at UCLA in which 67 undergraduates were asked to watch a video lecture. Half of them were randomly assigned to take notes using pen and paper while the other half was asked to take notes using a laptop while watching the video. After that, the students were asked to take an exam. It was found that the students who took notes using pen and paper did much better than the ones who took notes using laptop on conceptual questions.

A few months before Gross pulled the plug, Clay Shirky, a social media professor at New York University, banned the use oftechnology in his classrooms. Shirky observed that distractions due to electronic devices grew over the years in his classes. Moreover, he notes whenever he asks his students to shut down their electronic devices, "the conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students."

Shirky’s move to ask students to shut down electronic gadgets was aimed to prevent them from multi-tasking and engage with social media. He reasons multi-tasking is bad for high quality cognitive work and cites a study from Stanford that suggests heavy multi-taskers are not good at choosing a task to concentrate on. He further adds “the problem is especially acute with social media, because on top of the general incentive for any service to be verbose about its value, social information is immediately and emotionally engaging. Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting, especially compared with the hard slog of coursework.”

Finally, Shirky cites another study that suggests participants who were multitasking on a laptop during a lecture had lower scores on a test as compared to those who did not. In addition to that, participants who were in direct view of another participant who was multitasking scored lower than those who were not. This suggests laptop multitasking distracts not only the one who is doing it but also the one who is sitting nearby and can see someone multitasking.

The above stories suggest technology is not always beneficial for students in a classroom. Hence, we, as educators, must engage in enough deliberation before asking students to use technology and electronic gadgets in classrooms.

The Credit Hour System in US Universities

In the United States, the credit hour system is used to calculate the academic work done by a student in universities, both at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Students need to earn a specified number of credit hours in each degree program to be eligible to be awarded the degree. Apart from computing the amount of academic work done by students, credit hours are also used to compute the tuition and fee for students and determine their academic status. For example, at Virginia Tech, the tuition for each credit isUSD 437.25 for in-state undergraduates for the academic year 2015-16. Similarly, there are different fee amounts for each credit at graduate level and out-of-state enrollment. Moreover, full-time enrollment is defined as enrolling for at least 9 credit hours at graduate level and 12 credit hours at the undergraduate level. In order to obtain an undergraduate degree, a student is typically required to earn around 120 credits. In order to earn a graduate degree, the requirements vary starting from 30 to 90 credits depending on the type of degree.

In order to complete an undergraduate degree in four years, one needs to take 15 credits per semester on an average. According to the US Department of Education, to earn 1 credit, a student needs to spend 1-2 hours per week in-class and 2 hours of preparation time out of class. This means that a student who takes 15 credits per semester is required to spend 15-18 hours of time in class and 30 hours of time out of class. This sums up to almost 45-48 hours of academic work each semester. I think this is a very high expectation from students, especially considering the fact that students need to spend time on extra-curricular activities and co-curricular activities in college for which they do not get any credit. And if a student does a part-time job besides attending full-time college, something that a lot of students do, the number of hours which they need to spend on school and work easily add up to around 55-60. This means students have very little personal time in college. In order to meet their job and college requirements, a lot of students neglect their health and social life. This, in turn, leads to heath and psychological issues for them.

The situation gets even worse in graduate school. A lot of graduate students do a 20-hour assistantship besides their full-time graduate level academic work which is 9-12 credit hours per semester. At Virginia Tech, a graduate student on any assistantship is required to take 12 credit hours per semester. Although the in-class hours for graduate students is less than those of undergraduate students, due to the nature of graduate courses, the out-of-class hours per credit are greatly increased. Even if we assume that each credit in the Graduate School at Virginia Tech requires a total of 4 hours of academic work (this is only 1 hour per credit more than the undergraduate credit requirement), this would mean that each graduate student with a 20-hour assistantship needs to spend 68 hours on academic work and assistantship. Needless to say, this is impractical considering this is required of them each week of a semester.

However, this is not to say that students actually spend the same number of hours per week as discussed above to obtain their degrees. Studies have shown that students, especially undergraduates, spend a lot less than 3 hours per week to earn a credit. I myself have earned a graduate level degree at Virginia Tech but do not think I spent 4 hours per credit for all the credits I earned for the degree. But whatever number of hours students actually spend to earn their degrees, in theory, the requirements seem too difficult and taxing.

And You May Contribute a Verse…

While answering the question ‘what is good among the struggles, failures, and emptiness of life?’, the famous American poet Walt Whitman, in his poem ‘O Me! O Life!’ says, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here, he refers to life as a powerful play, the sequence and progression of which is beyond any individual’s control. However, at the same time, the poet gives immense power in the hands of each individual by noting that each person “may contribute a verse” in this powerful play. In other words, a person can use their voice to contribute to and shape the ongoing conversations in their life.

The ability to contribute to the ongoing raises a basic question: How does one do it? There need to be some channel or medium through which an individual can put forth their opinions and viewpoints. The Scholarship in any field is limited to the researchers or the ones who have made their mark in the field. The print media is similarly not accessible to the common masses to express their viewpoints. And both the Scholarship and the print media, at times, are guided by the dominant narrative and have ulterior agenda and motifs. In such a case, it becomes difficult for anyone to present an opinion especially if it does not go along with the dominant narrative.

Social media which includes, but is not limited to, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, provide a means for people to share their beliefs with the world and eventually engage in a conversation with others on topics which they are interested in. Once can use one or more social media platforms to post their viewpoints on a topic and similarly be aware of others’ viewpoints on the same topic by following others on the social media platforms. Moreover, through social media, one can connect with people with similar interests and passions and eventually form a tribe which has the power to bring about changes which an individual alone cannot.

Social media not only provides a platform to express oneself and communicate with others but also serves as a platform for academic collaboration, teaching and learning, and engaging in a social dialogue. There are multiple blogs (some of which are referenced here) which are dedicated to history, medicine, and business among other disciplines. These blogs can serve as resources for students and faculty alike. Blogs can also be used as an outlet for students’ works as is being done in the ‘Contemporary Pedagogy’ and ‘Preparing the Future Professoriate’ classes done at Virginia Tech. Some blogs allow multiple authorship and thus those provide avenues for collaboration in academia and in the process of learning.

Blogs and other social media platforms foster interaction among learners. This interaction helps people construct knowledge from a constructivist viewpoint. Unlike the traditional teacher-centric model of education, social media provides a model of learning which is centered on the learner in that the learner engages with the rest of the world using social media and learns in collaboration with others. Collaborating with others to learn also helps the learners to integrate multiple viewpoints in their learning unlike the traditional model where the learner is exposed to only the teacher’s and/or their classmates’ viewpoints.

In a nutshell, while Whitman suggests that the good thing about life and the world is that one has the ability to change them through their efforts, social media provides one with the opportunity to channelize those efforts so that they bear fruits.

Mission Statements of Universitites

As the name suggests, mission statements represent the purpose of educational institutions. These are the milestones which universities aim to achieve and hence serve as a guide to institutional practices. A lot of times, mission statements are aspirational in nature i.e. they suggest what the intuitions aim to achieve in future and are working toward it. While there exist similarities in mission statements of different universities, there are also considerable differences in their mission statements. These differences differentiate one educational institution from the others. In this blogpost, I will compare and contrast the mission statements of two universities, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT Roorkee) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), from which I hold engineering degrees. I did my undergraduate from IIT Roorkee and my Masters from Virginia Tech, both in Electrical Engineering.

The home page of the official website of IIT Roorkee states that the institute’s mission is

“To create an environment that shall foster the growth of intellectually capable, innovative and entrepreneurial professionals, who shall contribute to the growth of Science and Technology in partnership with industry and develop and harness it for the welfare of the nation and mankind.”

IIT Roorkee is primarily an engineering university in India, owned and run by the central (or federal) government of India. It is a small university with a total student population of less than 10000, including undergraduate and graduate students. Since IIT Roorkee is primarily focused on engineering, its mission is to “contribute to the growth of Science and Technology.”

The mission statement of Virginia Tech states:

“Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) is a public land-grant university serving the Commonwealth of Virginia, the nation, and the world community. The discovery and dissemination of new knowledge are central to its mission. Through its focus on teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach and engagement, the university creates, conveys, and applies knowledge to expand personal growth and opportunity, advance social and community development, foster economic competitiveness, and improve the quality of life.”

Virginia Tech, located in Blacksburg, Virginia, has a student body of around 30000, which means it is almost thrice as large as IIT Roorkee in terms of student enrollment. Although the name of the university has the word “polytechnic” in it, students can study diverse disciplines at Virginia Tech including liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, music, and theatre. This is probably the reason why the mission statement does not explicitly mention words like technology or engineering. Rather it states that the university focuses on “teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach and engagement.” One notable information provided in Virginia Tech’s mission statement is a public land-grant university. There is no information provided about the type of university IIT Roorkee is in its mission statement.

One thing which stood out to me while reading Virginia Tech’s mission statement was its goal to foster “economic competitiveness.” IIT Roorkee’s mission statement does not mention of any kind of competition. I think the reason for this is the nature of social systems present in both the countries. While India is a welfare state where the government has the responsibility to ensure the welfare of all its citizens, the USA thrives on a capitalist system where money and profit guide organizations with little government control in the lives of the people.

Despite having notable differences, the mission statements of both the universities have some similarities as well. Both the universities aim to contribute to the welfare of their respective nations and the mankind in general. Both the mission statements mention individual’s growth as one of their aims. And finally, both the mission statements promise generic qualities such as growth of intellectually smart individuals, research and discovery, entrepreneurial mindset, engagement, welfare of the nation and the humankind. This is in accordance with some of the skeptics who suggest that mission statements use vague language and present generic outcomes.

My Customary New Year Blog Post!!!

I have been away from blogging for almost six months and hence I was a big deal for me to break the inertia to start writing a blog-post. But I had to break that inertia because I want to start writing again. And what can be a better day to restart my activity on blogosphere. Moreover, the past year was so full of internal joy, peace and happiness that it would be unfair if I do no cement my gifts from the past year by writing them here. This is a break from my usual New Year posts where I would write about some philosophical wisdom and will eventually decide to follow that philosophy. I think this is an apt change because a lot of times what happens with our lives is completely unexpected and not according to our plan.

Without further ado, let me now briefly talk about some of the most beautiful things which happened to me last year in no particular order. It should be noted that a lot of these things are related to each other in that one of these things was affected or influenced by the other or one led to the other.

1. Instructor at Virginia Tech

I was the instructor for ENGE 1215 (Foundations of Engineering-1) during Fall 2014. Teaching 56 beautiful students was very satisfying. I believe that I love someone when I am ready to go to any extent for their happiness and success, and I felt the same for each of my students. Moreover, it was extremely gratifying whenever any of my students told me that they enjoyed being in my class.

2. Friends

I believe friends occupy a very important aspect of my life. Last year I made a few friends who I can rely on in case of any need. If you are my friend and you are reading this, I promise you I will be with you every time you need me.

3. Self-Identity

Last year, I was able to free myself with years of guilt and agony over my own self-identity. I tried to openly embrace who I am and it was a feeling like no other. I am extremely happy that I got the required support from the people around me to do this.

4. AcrossBorders@VT

I along with my friend Hoa started a group at Virginia Tech to provide support to those people who identify themselves as part of sexual minority and were born and brought up in a non-American culture.

I have purposefully written only a few sentences under each of the above-mentioned headings. If you are interested in any of these aspects of my life, please feel free to talk more about it with me. I absolutely love talking about any of these things.

And to close it, I would just say:

“Life is beautiful and there is love in the air, enjoy the life and feel the love!”

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! :-)

On Being a TA...

The job of a teacher is to help the students learn the subject and that of a teaching assistant is to help the instructor in doing that. But does making the students learn the subject mean equipping them with the required theorems and formula so that they solve the mathematical sum asked to them? Or does it mean telling them the necessary technique to write a good paper or make an impressive presentation?

The responsibility of educators and education system at large is beyond these minute intricacies.  Teaching should be aimed at helping the students see the bigger picture in any subject, be it mathematics, or biology, or history, or literature.

The job of an instructor or a TA is to mediate whenever necessary to help the students see the bigger idea. The first step towards this is not to provide students with the answer but to guide them work towards it. This is something which I learned through the GTA workshop where it was emphasized again and again not to give answers to students’ doubts but help them solve those on their own.

Easier said than done! Working as a GTA for the Circuits & Electronics classes, my biggest challenge has been to prevent myself providing the direct answers to students’ problems and at the same time making sure that they are able to see the larger idea. In other words, I have to help students solve the problems on their own, make them understand the relevance of what they are doing, and equip them to apply what they learn in the process.

The process of following these guidelines has been taxing so far as students come expecting a ready-made answer to their problems. And they are not patient enough to understand the theorem or the formula which they need to apply in order to get the answer.  They just want to know the relevant formula and not the concept involved in how one can derive them. At times even if they want to understand the mechanics behind a theorem, they get intimidated by the mathematical details involved. In such scenario, I make sure that I explain the concept to them by reducing nuanced facts and specific details and rather focus on the primary concepts (the bigger idea!).

An example of focusing on the larger idea is making student realize that current is nothing but a movement of electrons and since electrons flowing in a circuit cannot accumulate at a node and hence all the electrons coming to a node must leave it. This is nothing but Kirchhoff’s Current Law which states that sum of currents at a node is zero, a bit complex statement for students to understand.

Use of analogies also becomes a very effective tool in doing this. For example, many students do not understand how potential gradient drives the current in a circuit (Ohm’s Law). Here I generally ask them to consider the voltage difference as the difference between two heights and current as water flowing from a higher altitude to lower which makes them understand the role of voltage difference in a circuit.

The biggest learning which I had through such experiences is that students are willing to learn if they are able to comprehend what is taught to them. And as instructors (or TAs) it is our responsibility to help them understand a complex concept starting from the basic ones. And the results of this technique are manifest when I see students appreciate learning high-level engineering concepts from the basics and applying them confidently in their homework problems.