No place like home

News 8 Austin profiled my lab, the Wireless Networking and Communications Group at The University of Texas at Austin last night as part of a news story on the recent trend of increasing numbers of international engineering graduate students opting to return back to their home countries upon graduation.



They interviewed fellow-labbie Aamir Hasan who cheers for the wrong side ;) in a cricket match

Incentives are extended by foreign governments too. Aamir Hasan is an
example of that. His education is paid for by the government of Pakistan.

"The government felt, about five or six years ago, that they needed a lot of Ph.Ds from abroad so that they could study at a good university and then come back and take the knowledge back with them to Pakistan," Hasan said.

The report goes on to state that

...industry recruiters say there's just not enough in the states to fill the
demand because the field isn't emphasized enough in K-12 education, which
ultimately affects who ends up in advanced graduate programs like the
WNCG.

But the dilemma of when to go back and how to engineer a career shift back home is a worrying one. Career paths of people that have made the jump back across the pond are followed with interest and hardball salary negotiations are whispered urgently over veggie pot-luck soirees. But India is just in its infancy as far as R&D outfits are concerned. Lucent, Microsoft, IBM and GE have R&D labs in India, but they are still too small to accomodate even 50% of the PhDs that graduate in engineering grad programs in the US.

To see the video go here.