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At your own pace

PhDs of India
4 min readApr 7, 2021

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“As a kid, I would spend hours looking at birds and animals which fuelled my passion for the field. Moving through school, the complexity and the challenge associated with studying the living world compelled me to take up biology for my undergraduate degree. The move to Master’s and eventually to a PhD was a natural transition. The concept of research is usually fascinating to an outsider and I was no different. But unfortunately none of my past experiences taught me how to survive a PhD journey.

I was naive when I enrolled myself to the integrated MS-PhD course at IISER, Mohali. I never took the time to explore options before committing to one and sadly our society does not look very kindly upon people who take time off to figure out their next career move. We are mindlessly jumping from one-stage of the career to the next without assessing ourselves if we are ready to take the next plunge. Equating time-gaps in the career timeline to a person’s intelligence is a dangerous trap. Had it not been for this trap, I would have realized early on that it takes more than a successful project to keep you in the journey and the morale of the people around you have a very big effect on your personal willingness to work.

When I started my PhD, I was in love with my project and there was a lot of progress happening which made me more enthusiastic to continue it. Unfortunately, all projects were not…

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PhDs of India
PhDs of India

Written by PhDs of India

Inspired from HONY and HOB; bringing you stories of unsung heroes of our society: PhD students. For sharing yours, email us at: phdsofindia@gmail.com!

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