We are very fond of fancy words. It took me two years of M.Sc to realize that I should have never done biotechnology because I did not learn anything and forgot everything about chemistry. It took me one year of hard work before I was confident to appear in subject GRE. It is a different matter that I did manage to get 98 percentile and that UVa offered me a PhD seat based solely on that score.
As I sat through one more year of PhD interviews and listened to students telling us that they had done biotechnology in B.Sc and M.Sc, I felt throttling the person who dared to perpetrate this bad joke on the Indian Universities. Every one offers Biotech and all possible variations of Biotech. In addition, there is a B.Sc Biochemistry, B.Sc Microbiology and all other sorts of fancy courses. These students know nothing of biochemistry, or chemistry, or physics, or math, or biology. In fact they know nothing!
Today I was at National Institute of Plant Genome Research (some time later I will spew out my rants on Institutes)as an external examiner. The objective was the same- select candidates for PhD program.
Some of the students who attended the interview had done biochemistry and knew about enzymes. Now enzymes are catalysts. They bind to a particular compound called substrate and help it to be converted into a product. The affinity of an enzyme for a particular substrate is constant. However, the rate of reaction is altered. So my question was very simple: If you keep the enzyme concentration constant and vary the substrate concentration, you will get saturation at a particular point. From this graph, you can calculate the affinity of the substrate for the enzyme. Next, what will happen if you increase or decrease the concentration of the enzyme.
Not a single student knew what would happen.
We are mean at times. We take pot shots at them. We expect them to know the very basics like how to make solutions. What is 1M solution and how will you make it? What is a buffer?
The student knows all about hi-fi techniques- the latest in the field. But none of them know what is a buffer, the very basis of a laboratory reaction.
What does one do?
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