A Curious Mind

“I wasn’t motivated to do a PhD at all. I came into this profession out of curiosity thinking it might be cool to become a researcher and work in a laboratory. I was the kind of person who never liked going to college but loved reading on my own. I was more intrigued by various concepts rather than mere facts and probably that’s one of the primary reasons why I made it to IISER Pune during the integrated Master’s-PhD interviews.

It was after I started working for my Master’s thesis that I realized I loved doing research and wanted to continue on the same path. The supervisor I worked with, had a tenure track and was under the pressure of publishing papers. He published one with my data without even telling me that I was the first author. I came to know about it after the paper got accepted. Being an immature kid at that point, I didn’t understand how important a publication was. It took me a couple of days and a series of congratulations from different people to appreciate the achievement.

I first called up my sister to share the good news, but since my entire family has never even come remotely close to doing research, she thought that I was referring to an exam I had taken. She asked me how it was. I found it quite difficult to explain to her what a paper was. I then tried to inform my mother who was equally confused. She told me to bring that ‘paper’ home. Seeing it, she asked very innocently how one knew that it was my paper. I showed her my name on the first page. She replied back that it was only mentioned on one page among a total of seven pages and asked whether she could write her own name on it. I gave up and simply told her that I would get my PhD degree if I could publish about five of those papers.

Considering how naive I was when I started out, my PhD journey was extremely good. I had five publications by the end of second year of PhD. My mother thought I had got my degree and even accused me of lying to her that five papers could fetch a PhD degree. It took me a great deal of time to elucidate that a PhD comprised a lot of other factors than just papers.

My life got a bit challenging when my PhD supervisor, with whom I had regular discussions, suddenly told me one day that I had to be independent in my work and design my own projects. I wasn’t mentally prepared for that. Some undergraduate students in my…