Counseling services

I have been ambivalent towards the reservation policy as initiated by the government. My problem with it has been that we are pushing students into higher education without adequate preparation at school levels. That our schools are abysmal is well-known- just go to the schools in small towns and villages and you will know what I am talking about.

But I have a deeper problem: Most of the universities are not equipped to deal with these students.

Given that our society is highly patriarchal, the students from smaller town and villages carry their own baggage when they come to large cities or to universities like mine for higher studies. I deal with Ph.D. students so my discussion will be limited to them.

The girls, because so much curbs have been put on them, view the entrance into PhD as liberation. Many times the M.Sc girls will come up to me to say that if they get into PhD will I accept them as their student because you see if they go back home, they will be married off and that would be the end of their career. The girls, because of this very fear, try to do their best- they will work hard to complete their thesis because their is a deadline on their head, they have no hesitation in asking again and again if they do not understand something, they will discuss their experimental results with others and think of better ways to do the experiments. More importantly, if they are unable to analyze their data they have no problems in going to their supervisor or discussing with other students.

The boys, most of them, are exactly the opposite. Brought up on a steady diet of men are superior, they are absolutely incapable of adjusting to the new world. Some of them do, but many of them simply cannot. I have one such student who is from the hinterlands of Bihar. He is diffident, he cannot analyze any data (thanks to the inadequacies of his school as well as college education), and he has to work with a woman. Poor chap! Of course we can say why he does not raise above all this. The answer is that he cannot. That is about it.

If the University had been sensible (and few of us have been insisting on it), there would be a counseling service for such students. Place where they can unburden themselves, place where they would be taught to adjust into the new world, taught how to interact with other students especially girl students, and taught how to cope with the fact that their supervisor is a woman.

But as the University is not sensible such students are left to fend for themselves and most end up being absolutely unhappy. So here is my student, who I simply do not know how, is going to write and defend his thesis. He will be termed as a scientist but I cannot envisage what he would do really.

I feel sorry for him and angry at myself. If I had bit of sense I would have addressed this problem in the beginning itself. But as he was my first student, and this was my first exposure to this kind of problem, I have made a complete muck of it. I end up more than half the time losing my temper when I should not. And then I feel even more angry and upset :(

Of course I can always console myself that I did not know any better, I can also console myself by saying why does not he make an effort, but the truth is that it just leaves an unpleasant metallic taste in my mouth.