Having seen the military up-close (by studying with them and being taught by them), I can only be amazed at the magnitude of the difference between the public (civilian) perception of the military and the reality. But those are stories for another day.
Any criticism of the military in civilian circles is unpopular and is responded by allegations of treason and a recount of how glorious the armed forces are. And obviously, any criticism of the military in military circles is equal to a black Vigo at your door.
Huh..I keep trying to make this thread a happy place and failing lol.
Let me narrate a recent story. I met a NUST-CAE (Risalpur) civilian graduate recently. Extremely bright guy pursuing a PhD here. I met him for the first time and he had what I can only describe as PTSD from spending four years at CAE. As he narrates being a civilian in CAE was hell. He was constantly treated/roughed up like a cadet, especially so because he was top of his class. He was full of rage how barely passing cadets behaved like (and were treated by faculty like) superior in caliber to civilians. He said from day one the cadets were taught they were better than everyone and the cadets never made him forget it. There were different bathrooms for cadets and civilians. This didn't sound like a Pakistani in a Pakistani university in 2010s. This sounded like a brown person in the British Air Force Academy in 1930. The colonial hangover is strong with the military - that is obvious.
But then I think this isn't JUST the military. I look at SUPARCO and they had different bathrooms for officers and "others". All these civilians do exactly the same horrible things that we talk about the military. The colonial hangover is with everyone, not just with those few that end up in the military. I have very little doubt that if we had civilian supremacy in Pakistan we would be talking about the exact same things, just with different actors. It's just that the military is in control and is efficient in maintaining its control so it's the "gora sahb".
I just keep thinking how many good people we have pushed out of Pakistan forever like this. Not that we have a hundreds to replace them either.
I'll tread carefully here by narrating some anecdotes and examples. The black Vigo prevents me from being very specific.
- As a lowly junior year student, my interview was conducted by one 1-star and two Captains - all US-educated PhDs. Not once did my lack of knowledge/experience/etc ever come up, no one gave me a dressing down. When I described my purpose of joining as getting practical research/project experience under a professor and my future plan of getting an MS from the US or Europe, the Commodore suggested to the Captains, "Maybe we can send him for an MS, fully paid and he can come back and join us". The Captains agreed. I don't think they were trying to humor me. Three of my friends and some other seniors had been shortlisted for this final interview and none of them reported any arrogant behavior or 'dressing down' incidents.
- We were working in specific labs and it was regular practice to approach the lab director/PI (Captain rank) directly in his office. My PI even conducted some after-hours sessions to help us with our Electromagnetics course (since we had a terrible professor in class) at our request.
- The PI and Co-PI (both PN) gave a full blown going-away dinner in honor of one of the (civilian) engineers who was accepted into a US university. Point being: there was no hint of the arrogance or bloody-civilian mindset around there
- All of us 20-somethings were working on live projects and using equipment worth hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of rupees. We were given a free hand to find creative solutions to whatever problems that would come up.
- There is a realization among the PN R&D people (the guys with PhDs) that we can not possibly develop everything in-house and so there is a combination of collaboration with local private industry and OTS procurements. Integration of systems from different OEMs was the main focus area.
However, everything is not all rosy, there's some bad news too:
- Project management practices are non-existent: as such there is huge underutilization or even wastage of very valuable resources. There are no set procedures for agreeing upon deliverables, timelines.
- The PN top brass (the guys at the very top) suffers from a deplorable lack of realization of the complexities of tech R&D and project delivery. They just think that by putting a bunch of PhDs, MS grads and UGs in a lab they have created the Pakistani equivalent of the Office of Naval Research, USN.
- The pay and benefits are mediocre (specially for those with MS or BE degrees) and this does not attract the best talent. The initial group of young geniuses (from the top national universities) has all moved on, leaving behind a mediocre to poor group of fresh grads from the lowest tier universities of Pakistan (no offence meant to anyone)
- There is zero cross-functional collaboration e.g. if LAB 1 requires a Vector Network Analyzer and LAB 2 (working on RF & comm projects) already has a VNA, LAB 1 will not ask LAB 2 for support. Instead, LAB 1 will go ahead and order a VNA for itself (price tag in crores of rupees)
- Poor work ethic of the (civilian) staff - 80-90% of the R&D staff is civilian - people use office PCs (mostly high end machines) to play games. This is in addition to the typical Pakistani practices of hours long namaz, lunch and smoke breaks. As a result, almost no work gets done during the day.
- Review presentations with the PI and other senior-level people is usually an exercise of falsifying test results and data, showing photoshopped pictures, etc
- Wrong people for the wrong jobs and frequent recruitment and resignations (i.e. coming and going of people is a routine
Thank you!
Well, when my time comes, I will definitely seek your help with this.
Definitely. Just fair warning that I was talking about very specific positions that have been filled since. However, I can still put you in touch with the right people with the right recommendations. Funny story: I even tried advising an FYP for some Pakistani students - it didn't turn out well. But that's a story for another day.
As a fresh grad, I am reeling with the realization of the true extent of what I DON'T know. If my BE degree taught me anything, it is the scale of how illiterate I am.
Feeling Exactly the same. And its overwhelming.
At the risk of sounding like a sasta motivational speaker, this is very very good. I wish more people had this realization when they graduated. You shouldn't be like the PAF flt lt with the 2.0 GPA that thinks they can now design Azm lol.
Not sure how scientifically verified this "Dunning-Kruger Effect" is but it sure is useful to talk about things. Most UG's are at the peak of mount stupid when they graduate. Our research group had one this month - an American that thought he was the top of the world because he knew how to run some software packages that we didn't know about, he quit because he didn't want to work unless he was the first author of a paper that had 30 percent chance of being accepted. So stupid arrogant people everywhere is the point.
You guys are lucky that you have passed the peak and are probably at A? That's the good news.
The bad news is that it gets worse. Point B will probably happen somewhere towards the very end of your PhD if you pursue one. And then the rest of your life is spent slowly climbing the slope of enlightenment and then you die before reaching any sort of plateau (that plateau is a fiction in my opinion).
Btw If I am procrastinating these days, then
@JamD you are to blame for it lol
Will have to go through all these papers, no doubt about it
Please don't lol. These papers are fun as curiosities and to see what fun secret applications they are being applied to but they are not great scientific papers and you won't learn much of value. Many of these have been submitted to subpar journals and conferences, which means they will have lots of errors/typos and reading a paper with those is not a burden a researcher should take. It's the author's job to make their paper as perfect as possible if they want it to be read seriously.
