NGS的SKYPE面试

strongchaiUID: 3435382

xiaoyongnao 发表于 2013-8-14 09:54
guesstimate is rather interesting

听起来是挺有趣的……，但是在面试的时候听到这个问题还是挺意外的，稍微有点紧张。我是以自己学校为模板猜测的，一个学院50个老师，一个学校20个学院，一个国家100所学校，所以高校有10W，然后中科院的就按高校的一半折算为5W，所以我最后给出的估计结果是15W吧。那个印度人口音的面试官貌似有点惊讶和不屑~，至于学生的估计，我以每个老师能带的学生数量不同无法估计为由直接说无法估算了事。

xiaoyongnaoUID: 3433354

strongchai 发表于 2013-8-14 10:11
听起来是挺有趣的……，但是在面试的时候听到这个问题还是挺意外的，稍微有点紧张。我是以自己学校为模板 ...

If you’ve never met similar questions before, you might have some troubles in this kind of guesstimates. In this case, your target is to estimate the total amount of scientists and graduate students in China mainland. The purpose of the interviewee is not to get the right answer, but to learn your analytical thinking ability.

OK. To begin with, you may propose the definition of “scientist” to help yourself narrow down the difficulty of the estimation.

Here are my answers. (of course there is no “right” answer…)

Pathway 1: ratio of scientist/graduate students method

OK. This is an interesting question. I think I would base on the current situation in my university. Maybe I have to make some assumptions. If you think any of them is inappropriate, you could correct me immediately.
Frist, I need to define the concept of “scientist”. Of course some Nobel laureates are obviously scientists, but unfortunately we have none. I think only those who have significant academic contribution could be labeled as “scientists”. Our university owns 26 colleges. My college is a medium one, which contains about 400 undergraduate students, 600 graduate students and 50 professors. As I mentioned before, among 50 professors, I think there are only about 10 professors could be called scientists base on my discipline.
Therefore, we could see the ration of graduate students and undergraduate students is about 6:4, and the ratio of scientists and graduate students is approximate 1:60.
As we all know, each year about 6M candidates are enrolled in undergraduate degrees programs in China mainland. Most of them spend four years in college. So the total amount of undergraduate students is about 24M. We could therefore calculate that we have about 36M graduate students with the ratio above. Then we could easily know that the amount of scientists in China mainland is about 600K.

Pathway 2: from the amount of universities

First I want to estimate the amount of scientists and graduate students in each university, and then I will estimate the amount of universities in China mainland. So we could easily get the answer. Do you think my method is rational? (“OK”)

To begin with, I will use my own university as an example. We have 20 colleges. My college is a medium one, which owns 50 professors and 600 graduates. Among 50 professors, I think 10 out of them could be nominated as “scientist” in my list. In sum, there are 200 scientists and 12000 graduate students in our university.

Second, we need to calculate the amount of universities in China mainland. In China, education is relatively centralized. We have 31 provinces, which could be segmented to two pools: advanced education province and normal province. The advanced province includes Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu. I think the total amount is 6. In this kind of province, each owns at least 40-60 universities. I will take 50. Then the total number of universities is 300. On the other hand, in those normal provinces, there are about 30 universities in each province. So the total amount is about 30* 25=750. Then we have 750+300=1050 universities in China mainland.

Finally, I could calculate the answer based on my analysis. The total amount of scientists is 200*1050=210K, while the number of graduate students is 12000*1050=12.6M. I should miss some independent institutes, such as Chinese Academy of Sciences. I will plus another 50K scientists and 3M graduate students.

So my final answer is there are 260K scientists and 15.6M graduate students in China mainland currently.  
   

strongchaiUID: 3435382

kuaido 发表于 2013-8-14 16:20
嗯昨天发邮件问了，他也是说reviewing process is ongoing,敬候佳音吧

Good luck to you and me！希望能做同学，哈哈~！