For IIT aspirants wanting to pursue Physics

The Physics Department, IIT Madras is offering an Dual Degree MS programme in Physics!

The Course:

The course is a 5 year Dual Degree MS programme. The first two semesters of the course will be common with the rest of the engineering branches, excepting some variations where engineering-oriented courses will be replaced by more fundamental courses. This is designed so that branch-change after the end of the first semester is possible. At the end of the 5 years, (as is the case with any other dual degree programme), the student will be given both a Bachelor’s degree and a Masters’ degree in Physics. Entrance will be through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).

The intake per year stands at 10 students.

Worthy of mention is an innovative course on ‘Contemporary Physics’ – named so (as Prof. V Balakrishnan put it) because ‘Modern Physics’ still refers typically to de Broglie’s hypothesis! This course will focus on the latest advances in various branches in Physics and will be taught by several faculty from the department.

The Department:

The Department of Physics at IIT Madras is, in my opinion, probably one of the best Physics departments that you’d get across the country in the IITs.

The department has a strong low temperature and condensed matter group, a strong atomic and molecular physics group, a strong optics group, and a strong theory group working in fields like Quantum Information, String Theory, Dynamical Systems and Statistical Physics. Worthy of mention is the nanosciences group, out of which several patent-winning innovations have sprung up. An astrophysics group is expected to form very soon.

At the undergraduate level, in addition to the 5-year Dual Degree MS programme, the department offers a 4 year B.Tech. programme in Engineering Physics.

Physics has grown far from what we studied at JEE. Here are some of the stuff that’s done at the department:

• A model for the fluid in a cell? Why not!
• Superconductor research!
• What if we could have a theory that can describes everything?
• Can we model something as complicated as traffic flow?
• Can we store Hydrogen most effeciently and retrieve it whenever we want?
• Chaos!
• Can we find materials with amazing properties?
• Can we make light work in a circuit?
• Does Physics in the universe’s mirror image look different?
• Quantum Entanglement – the currency of Quantum Information!

Personal Opinions

I’m a student in the Engineering Physics [EP] BTech programme in this department and have an inclination towards Theoretical Physics. I find the courses in the department very enjoyable and find most of the faculty outstanding. Most faculty are very helpful and warm, and try to do their best to ensure you a successful career.

I also find the subject matter of theoretical physics very enjoyable. We’ve been doing a lot of “fun” stuff (far more fun than JEE physics) like studying the chaotic dyanmics of population growth, solving for the curvature of spacetime around a blackhole, describing interactions of LASER light with an atom quantum, studying functions with very weird singularities, or working dynamics in some “twisted” spaces in our courses so far! As Feynamn points out, there’s something called ‘Intellectual Enjoyment’ and classes in the last 2 years have been an experience of the same.

That apart, we also have a theory discussion group called ‘Boltzmann’ out here which meets on Saturdays in the department. We discuss theory just for fun. We discuss rather advanced topics in various branches of Physics. We discussed the ‘Ising model’ last semester, and one of my batchmates took that forth into a model for economic markets that he’s currently working on. This semester, we discussed a wide variety of topics including Quantum Information Theory, Quantum Computing, Group Theory and some quantizations of fields.

I guess the MS programme will be just as much fun (or maybe even more – hey, you don’t do some boring old courses on Fourier transforms!) as the EP programme. If you have a strong liking for Physics, then the Dual Degree MS is probably for you. If you’re still ‘undecided’, the Engineering Physics programme may be a good idea as it gives you the required credentials to continue as an Electrical Engineer.

Interested?

If you need some help deciding, you could contact me < akarshsimha AT gmail DOT com >; my friends from EP, Vikram < vkrmsv AT gmail DOT com > and Naveen < naveensharma30 AT gmail DOT com >; or Dr. Suresh Govindarajan < suresh AT physics DOT iitm DOT ac DOT in >. All of us will be happy to help you make a decision or tell you what Physics is like!

Ragging – both perspectives

When I was a freshie (that’s how seniors “lovingly” call the freshers), I told my parents that I was “confident” of going through ragging. Probably it was to keep them less worried. I wasn’t very comfortable, in reality.

Imagine, you enter an institute, a hostel, where you don’t know anyone. You’re yet to make new friends, your close friends may not be in the same hostel as you, your parents with whom you lived all through your life are no longer around to care for you. Basically, you are typically in a state of deprivation of emotional support.

I was not very comfortable for a full month when I entered IIT Madras. My seniors were nice people – but that’s not the impression they gave me – because even the mildest “bossing over” at a time when you are deprived of emotional support puts you in a state where you need emotional support all the more, but you don’t have it. So obviously, there’s the fear of getting ragged, and I did go through this throughout my first month at IIT. Even now, because of that mental impression, I am not very comfortable with most seniors who “ragged” me (but this strictly depends on the nature of the person. There are people who get along very well with the seniors who ragged them the most)

The second year was totally different. I had gotten used to hostel life by then, had a lot of friends, had learnt to live semi-independently, in the company and support of friends. We were having an interaction session with our new “freshies”. It was very mild – my friends were just cross-questioning them. Saying things like “Do you know what IMDB is? What? You don’t know, Ha! Ha! Ha!” (neither did I ). This, from a senior’s perspective is absolutely harmless. If I applied my 2 ounces of logic, this is all trivial. It definitely isn’t something to be scared of or worried about. But that fresher who was asked this question actually cried! We didn’t realise that “damage” we were doing. At that time, fear + lack of emotional support totally crumples you down at the slightest! I was really surprised – what looked absolutely trivial to me, did not for the fresher. We later supported him and helped him recover and talked to him on friendly terms. But I learnt this one thing from that.

More than anything, it is the fear of ragging that is worse than the ragging itself! It is hard to understand the mental state of the fresher at that time. To the senior, it all looks like fun, as it did to all of us. It is obvious that in most cases, the senior is also a human, and would stop if the freshie were to say that things were going overboard – but what he doesn’t realise is that in the mental state of “devastation” that the freshie is in at that moment, he doesn’t have the guts to tell the senior to stop. He’s in a state of complete domination, and it is not at all an enjoyable experience.

Probably it helps to build a good group of friends, and probably know a few seniors who understand this phenomenon clearly before walking into the IITs. It is mostly the lack of moral support and the fear – logically speaking otherwise, there isn’t anything at all to ragging. I’d probably be bossing over my brother and talking to him in a more rude way than a senior would to a freshie, but my brother will not give a damn – because he has moral support.

Just a few thoughts that I gathered after some freshers talked to a couple of us about ragging.