Brain Gain: PhDs abroad &Their Possible Services to Pakistan
By Syed Hassan Ahmed, PhD
Orlando, FL
During the past decade, Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC) has launched a number of projects in collaboration with some countries and has been successful in fosteringa research culture in Pakistan.The projects have allowed thousands of scholars to go abroad for higher studies on signing a bond that they will come back and serve the country. Fair enough.
Now the returning PhDs are mostly joining the academia and facing hardships in balancing their research and teaching load. Also, HEC is smart enough in maintaining statistics of “successful” returns, hence, I won’t go into those details.
However, we do need to focus our attention on those Pakistani scholars, who did not avail of the HEC scholarship programs and were lucky in getting funding, stipend, scholarships, or self-funded PhD admissions. Once they graduate and want to serve the country, they have two options: either join the TTS program or get a permanent position in a Pakistani university.
Nevertheless, one question arises here: what if Non-HEC scholars for some reason couldn’t return to the country? Shall we waste them? Forget about them? I would rephrase the question here, “Under what programs, HEC encourages Non-HEC Pakistani scholars and PhDs abroad to deliver various services to Pakistan at institutional levels?” Here it is worth mentioning that probably the top 20 or 50 universities of Pakistan have ongoing active collaboration with foreign universities and faculties, yet, HEC must play an important role in this matter.
This article proposes that HEC may invite institutions to form a program with a tentative title as “Bringing in Pakistani PhDs Abroad (PPA Program)” with the following possible services to be rendered by the joining members (to be named as PPA members):
PPA members shall be granted permission by HEC to co-supervise at most 3 grad students and 1 undergrad project group at a time with partner universities in Pakistan. After the regular verification of documents, like HEC approved Supervisor List, there can be other “List of Approved Pakistani Co-Advisors abroad” on the HEC website. Newbies may put their preferences in the online application to be forwarded to the selected schools and colleges of universities,and based upon mutual understanding, they may join Pakistani universities as an Adjunct Faculty, research consultant, etc. Moreover, PPA members must be responsible to mentor grad students in research, assist main advisor to write project proposals on cutting edge technologies and topics being investigated abroad. This way, research trends can be directly inducted into our educational society.
PPA program can lead students to communicate with their own countrymates abroad through a platform and will get their skills more developed. While keeping an eye on our economic growth, PPA members may receive more “recognition” than financial benefits, as the PPA membership can be an honorary position and different ways of recognition can be decided among participating institutes and HEC.
PPA members may establish or join local research chapters, where students and faculty may join to form research groups and start hosting domestic conferences and workshops on relevant topics. As of now, we have many ways to evaluate researchers; likewise, PPA members can be evaluated on different merits, for instance, an individual’s contributions to the review process of Pakistani PhD dissertations (again with utmost limit of 3 at a time). Through the PPA program, we can mitigate the hardships of enrolled students and universities to find “foreign” evaluators.
Finally, the PPA members can also share the burden of faculties in a way that the main advisors’ research load will be shared and thus they can focus on more quality teaching.
It can be foreseen that the proposed program can elicit more skills and services from Pakistani PhDs residing abroad. Besides, PPA members will have a better chance of being recognized and be able to collaborate with students and colleges of Pakistan. The writer hopes that HEC will take appropriate actions and will encourage PPA program at local institutes.
(The writer is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, University of Central Florida, Orlando)
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