My Essay for Rhodes

My Essay for Rhodes now available at
http://eureka-wow.blogspot.in/2013/07/my-rhodes-essay.html

-Jal

RHODES - LESSONS, EXPERIENCES, SECRETS

“So what is it you have in you that got you Rhodes?” a junior interviewing me for DU Beat casually asks.

“Hmmm…I don’t know.”

She stares at me blankly, not expecting the bluntness of the answer.

My mind runs into the multiple regression classes of econometrics and I wonder if I can make a list of factors and run a regression. The coefficients of the regressors could better decide the weight of each individual factor and give a precise answer.

She presses me again for reasons and I tax my mind and heart to spew out some, uncomfortable with the lack of rigor and precision in my answer.

As I sit down to write this blog, my mind races back and forth the events that transpired last year, around this time in June. My inbox is full of queries regarding the Rhodes application. Actually I have lots to tell and I figure out that it is becoming highly inefficient writing separate mails to different people. Moreover, I am a big proponent of knowledge sharing – information and anecdotal experience from a senior is also included in that ‘knowledge’ coz I think sometimes it can give you that edge that others might be deprived of.

And so, without bias I write this post – for you, dear junior.

I know you are inquisitive and ambitious. I know you have googled for Rhodes and histories of past scholars, just to land on that ‘perfect recipe’ that goes into winning it. I have some little experiences and advice to share, they may not all be connected, so I am writing out points.


1. A first year once asked me, “I am planning to write a paper on ABC subject in my break because I work for XYZ society in college which promotes the ABC subject. Do you think it will help me in my CV for Rhodes?”

I thought the question had such a Delhi-hue to it (sorry, Delhi-ites :p) Somehow, the idea of doing things just for the sake of bolstering one’s CV was a shock to me when I had first encountered it in college. I generalize it at my own risk, but I think ‘most’ people (there are exceptions) in colleges in Delhi (and may be elsewhere too) join a society not because they are passionate about it, but they are passionate about it because they want to join a society! So, the net result is that the passion is a feigned one, it dies down very soon and takes a shameless backseat as soon as CV and power considerations start dominating.


I hope you get the clue. If you think one can succeed in life with this sense of fake passion, you should really give yourself a second thought. I think I made it till the end because I never followed that idea and my enthusiasm for things I was passionate about, showed in every round till the final. It was genuine, so it came naturally. (Btw, I was hardly an active member of any society in college.)

In the final round, Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla had asked me quite tersely – “You have done quite a bit of social work. How do you think it distinguishes you from the social work done by other candidates?”

I was taken aback at the shallowness of the question, but probably they were testing me. I starkly told the panel what I had in my heart that I never did any social work so that it would give me an edge ‘over others’. I just taught kids because I would shrink within myself everytime I would see a bunch of street kids romping around my house. I had just asked out of genuine concern one day, ‘Parhoge kya’? And they had nodded and expressed so much enthusiasm that a little class had started under the shade of a tree. And then, I never had any intentions of making it grow, somehow my friends had heard about it and had started volunteering. Slowly, Éclair had scaled in size and made quite a big impact in the lives of the kids. But I told them that I hardly knew if things like these were even comparable across individuals. Probably other candidates had done something even better and that I could even learn from them, but my knowledge was limited to my work in an absolute sense, not a relative sense.


2.  Honesty is the best policy
Now this is something my friend Aleesha would be the best person to advise you. If you ever get a chance to meet her, you would be surprised and probably flabbergasted to discover that such people do exist. Every breath, every step, every word she utters is true, as simple as that. Be it the question of stating her score, getting a letter signed – she would rather take the long way and retain her honesty than shun it for the sake of short-term convenience.

When I first came to college and attended my first class in St. Stephen’s, I discovered that the professor was barely audible, the writing on the board barely legible and that I could understand virtually nothing. After the class, when I enquired around, I noticed a strange thing. Though people didn’t understand, they never admitted that they didn’t; there was always a ‘yes’ to the question ‘did you get that thing?’ but on further inquiry, I would conclude that even they were in the same boat as me. In other words, there was a false cover of cognizance of everyone’s lips but inside they were blank. But Aleesha was different. ‘I don’t know’, ‘I didn’t get it’, she would admit boldly without any sense of embarrassment in her voice, in that classful of smart people.

I was always touched, greatly.

I had once attended an international conference on the concept of death in different faiths. I remember eagerly listening to Dr Jaswant Singh Neki (eminent Sikh scholar and retired psychiatrist from PGI, Chandigarh). Somebody from the audience had put him a question to which he didn’t know the answer. It was a new and different field for him and he had never thought about the topic. I remember his words so distinctly

“Mai iss vishay te aapni aggyaanta iqbaal karda haan” (I admit my lack of knowledge on the subject).
(I’m not sure if I have translated that justly, hope you get the power of those strong words said in Punjabi).

It was an international conference and he was such a renowned academician. The message was that he had no hesitations saying, “ I DON’T KNOW ”

Je ne sais pas.

As simple as that.

I myself have never been that much of a perfectionist as Aleesha but I did pick up vital lessons from my experienced and had internalized them to quite an extent.

In the first round of Rhodes interview I was asked a couple of technical questions – I didn’t know the answer to a few of them. Instead of feeling ashamed or just to camouflage my ignorance I had not maundered – I had told the experts, ‘I don’t know’

They had switched the topic and asked me other questions. I had left the room feeling sheepish about my ignorance and lost all hopes. But then the call for the final interview had come…



3. Stochastic factors and Glucose
So junior, you have been making a list of factors right? – Sincerity, passion, honesty,…

But I’ll tell you the ultimate secret?

Even if you enlist all the factors possible – SOP, references, cv, confidence, lessons learnt from a conference… you would not be able to enlist them all. You will end but the list won’t because there are so many of them, because some of them aren’t even thinkable – they might be remotely related to one’s success.

In other words, in life as in econometrics, there are loads of stochastic factors apart from the deterministic ones captured so elegantly in what economists call the ‘error term’. It is a random disturbance, it may move up or down and alter the results. You have no control over it, how much ever you try. It is random.

I think there’s something really divine about the random disturbances. Some things are just unexplainable, unknowable – we club them under the error term. And faith in a Higher Power is just a belief that human abilities are insufficient to explain everything and that a random component exists!

I ended up saying a lot of that theory in my interview, you know :p and yes, my interview got steered to questions of religion, spirituality and faith.

On a lighter note, I’ll tell you another story about one stochastic factor in my Rhodes experience – Glucose.

If you’ve read Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ – you would know about the theory. The point is that human mind becomes lazy at times when glucose levels fall down. Restoring the sugar levels in the brain however brings back alertness. An experiment was once conducted on eight parole judges in Israel who spent entire days reviewing applications for parole. The default decision was denial of parole, only 35% of requests were approved.

A group of psychologists did a funny thing. They recorded the exact time of each decision and plotted it against the decision taken. The times of the judges’ food breaks were also recorded.

Guess what they found?

Maximum approvals were granted at times right after meals, the graph showed spikes after food breaks! The point was that tired and hungry judges tended to fall back on the easier and convenient default option of denying requests for parole. Fatigue and hunger had a role to play.

In my final interview, as I was pacing up and down the corridor of the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai. My turn was next and I was trying to ease all the nervousness and pressure. Four candidates had already gone in before me and each interview was about half an hour long. So two hours had slipped by and I thought, the jury (like the parole judges) might be tired. The Kahneman story flashed in my mind repeatedly and I thought (quite dramatically) that depleted glucose levels would be the deciding factor in the result that evening.

The giant door of the interview room opens. Mr Vir Chauhan comes out to escort the next candidate inside.

‘Miss Jalnidh Kaur’, he calls out.

I am already mid-way and I rush to him.

‘Miss Kaur, would you mind waiting for another ten minutes, the judges want to have a tea break’

I almost jump!