My experience of the Winter School held at IISER TVM

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 I am writing this blog post to share my experience at the Winter School I participated at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Thiruvananthapuram (previously known as Trivandrum), Kerala, India.

This is the second batch of the winter school started by IISER TVM. The winter school is called as Refresher and Preparative Winter School (RPWS). It is directed to the students who want to take up research as their career after their Masters. There were three departments for the winter school - Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The intake for the program was only 50 all over India. Application required us to submit our grade details and recommendation letters. I was really lucky to get selected for the winter school.

File:IISER TVM aerial view.jpg - Wikipedia
IISER TVM Campus

 The campus is situated in a very secluded area, almost 60 km from the city of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. The campus has necessary amenities like Health Centre, indoor stadium, tennis court, basketball court, volleyball court, cricket court, three dining halls, two cafe's, library, hostel blocks, shopping complex. There are three separate department wise buildings for Physics, Chemistry and Biology, and the Mathematics building is under construction.

The winter school sessions were held from 9:30 am to 7:00 pm with tea and lunch breaks in between. The lectures were engaged by the professors of the institute and I felt very lucky to have gotten such an opportunity to listen to the class from such great personalities. We also had the opportunity to visit the professors, their labs and interact with their research scholars. I personally got to interact with a few professors, and their research students, got to ask question regarding future prospects, their project work etc. 

Each professors got to engage two sessions for two days. One session was taken for the lecture and the other one was engaged for informing the students about their research work, what they are currently working on, and introducing us to their research students.

For the last three days of the winter school, we got the chance to visit the Central Instrumentation Laboratory (CIL) and Central Instrumentation Facility (CIF) at the institute, and also we got to conduct few experiments like X-Ray Diffraction, Arc Spectrum, Michelson Interferometry, Photoelectric Effect, Electron Resonance Spectroscopy.

The CIL had instruments worth 20+ crores like Scanning Electron Microscope, two Transmission Electron Microscope units, and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy unit.

XRD Data Analysis

High Performance Computing Unit

Indoor Stadium

Profilometer

Raman Spectrometer

Scanning Electron Microscope

Sputtering Unit

Transmission Electron Microscope Unit 1

Transmission Electron Microscope Unit 2

Thermal Evaporation Unit

X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy Unit

X-Ray Diffraction Unit

Book and ID Card

Certificate

It was truly an unforgettable experience. Thank you IISER TVM for organizing such an amazing winter school.





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