It Takes Two [Thai Scholars] to Think

Is Thailand losing an entire generation of academic potential? Here's how our government scholarships are falling short.

I recently read "It takes two to think" by Prof. Itai Yanai. This one-page correspondence explains why most government scholarship here in Thailand won't work. They government essentially throws individual 'Thai Scholar' to underrepresented universities, hoping he/she can help develop research program there. It's impossible (best case, REALLY hard) to establish anything meaningful when you're all alone at this new university where everyone else in the department only know university professors as 'teachers' rather 'researchers'

You toss your ideas around the department only to be echoed back with 'oh, that's too advanced'. Most of the time, 'doing research' at these institutions are mostly just replicating experiments already published elsewhere. Most of the faculty are only familiar with a pre-defined research report structure (5 chapters: intro, related work, methodology, result, conclusions) rather than telling a story around your finding (well, most of the time, there's no finding). Time passes. this new scholar who graduated from abroad and had high hope to start this academic research group, start to realize there's no way out. His/her ideas got mostly ignored. He/she eventually succumbs to just repeating the experiments like everyone else.

The country just lost 10 years waiting for this new faculty to graduate.

I'm not saying that it's always like this for all new grads under the Thai government scholarship program. Some may find a way to work around this limitations. Most of the time, it's finding there colleagues at large universities to bounce their ideas with. That's just something that the government NEEDS to provide, not just hoping for this kind of serendipity will magically happen when you throw new professors into underrepresented universities.