Interview: Sanjana Rajendran(CSE-2016)

Please state your current major and explain the area of research you are currently involved in. Do state your past research if any.

Electrical Engineering. Currently working on partially flexible clock network architecture in FPGAs.


What should students know before taking up research? How should they pursue their career in research?

This is something my friend told me before I started my work. In research, don’t look for motivation. You make progress by having discipline. Every day wake up and do different things. Until something works. No guarantee it’ll work. But this is what every Ph.D. student does At least the successful ones

Why are research internships important? How do students hone their skills through these internships? What other skills do you think students need to learn before/while pursuing highers in engineering and sciences?

It’s going to be too hectic. I took a year after bachelors before applying for masters. And a lot of my friends warned me about the schedule. So when I entered masters I knew it’s going to be hectic. I feel that this in a way prepared me to face it with ease. I was able to manage my time efficiently.

Where do you think, the research scenario in NIT Trichy needs improvement, and how can it be improved?

We need to stop worrying about grades. Few professors in our department had the grade criteria for us to do projects under them. The quality of projects is good enough. But half the professors don’t expect us to complete it. The final year project scenario in itself is a good example. I can for sure say almost 30-50% of the project groups didn’t do anything significant.  The conversion ratio of a project to a technical is very less. In our batch, there was just one group who published a technical paper.

What must one do after getting admitted into college? I.e How do you feel time must be utilised post-admission?

Post-admission, you can start looking for professors and projects that you are interested in working on.

What are some things about your career path you wish you knew in college, in retrospect? What exams do you think are most important to write before applying for highers? How useful is having work experience before applying for highers? Is one year time for work experience ample enough?

Work experience gives you a knowledge of the industry actually works. There a lot of things that we learn in academics that’s not applicable in the industry. Things taught to us in bachelors are so very out-dated. Masters is much better in that aspect. Work experience gives you an idea on how to handle deadlines with ease and efficiently managing your time. More than our club work. And also on the academics side also it helps. The number of years depends on where you work. I had the opportunity to work on three projects from start to end of which I handled two projects solo and one with a teammate in a year. You don’t that kind of an exposure in all companies.