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In its bid to boost research output from its faculty, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore is seeking to hire around 15 academic interns, who will "assist the professors", the institute's spokesperson said.
The number is indicative of the requirement but the actual figure will also "depend on the how many applications we get and the qualifications of the applicants".
But, "on an average we are looking for two interns in each of the areas of research at the institute," he said.
The areas include corporate strategy and policy, economics and social sciences, finance and control, marketing, organisational behaviour and human resources management, production and operations management and quantitative methods and information systems, as posted on IIMB's website.
The interns will work at IIMB for a maximum of three years. While their primary task is to do as much of the legwork required by the professors, who will then have more time to focus on putting together their research, "we will encourage them to attend seminars, take courses and write papers of their own," the spokesman said.
They will also have to help the faculty design courses and grade papers of the institute's regular post-graduate programme in management students.
The internship, the website says, "will provide an opportunity for qualified young professionals to work closely with the institute's faculty and thereby gain teaching and research skills."
For this work, the institute has set fairly stringent norms of eligibility: "Prospective academic interns should have (at the minimum) a masters degree in management, social sciences, engineering or other relevant discipline. Bachelors degree holders in engineering with at least two years of work experience may also be considered. Individuals registered for a PhD are encouraged to apply," says the website.
Stipends for the interns, however, at between Rs 8,000 and Rs 15,000 a month don't come anywhere near what the industry offers to young people with such qualifications.
So "ideally, we would want candidates who are already pursuing a PhD degree elsewhere, for we allow them to intern here in parallel," the spokesman said.
Over the last two years, the Indian Institutes of Management, particularly the older ones in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata, have come under increasing scrutiny, prompting some soul-searching within the institutes.
As the country's top "B-schools", each one has tried to find ways to bridge the gap between what they have been doing and what was expected of them and what they saw as necessary to be globally relevant.
The hiring of academic interns, a small step, should be seen as a recognition by the institutes that they need to do much more. IIMB's director Prakash G Apte first announced that interns would be hired at the institute's 30th convocation last month.
The institute's Vision Committee has come up with suggestions on benchmarking IIMB with the best management schools in the world and encouraging more research was an important part of that, he had said.
A committee has also been formed to find ways to scale up the Fellow Programme in Management, a doctoral level degree programme the IIMB offers.
The committee's recommendations will form the basis for admissions from June, 2006, Apte had said. At the 30th convocation, four candidates were awarded the Fellow of IIMB degree, down from seven for the previous year.
The scene is not different at the other institutes.
At the IIM, Bangalore, there are 87 faculty, including 19 visiting experts, but only a handful of full time research scholars.