Book to bench

“Ever since I was in school, I always envisioned myself doing research as opposed to pursuing medicine like my peers. I wanted to work on something that would eventually help mankind to fight deadly diseases.

Transitioning to PhD at IISc from MSc seemed very familiar to me, since I had grown up in an academic environment of NCL Pune and IIT Kgp. My father is a professor at IIT Kgp and my mother has a degree in LLB as well as Mathematics and I believe that my upbringing around academics had armed me with an optimistic mind towards a PhD. In India, it is often hard to make that transition from ‘books to bench’, in general.

In the beginning, the experiments in my PhD project were so non-conventional that it took me almost four months to set up my working systems. The slow and laborious start scared me because I was skeptical about finishing my PhD on time. In order to tackle this uncertainty, I took up several projects simultaneously; whenever I was stuck with one, I shifted to another one and came back to the former later.

PhD is a very unique journey in the sense that it doesn’t have a well-defined path. You don’t get a doctorate degree by merely following your supervisor’s advice, it requires a lot more than that. It is very important that we choose a laboratory based on if we would fit into that specific environment rather than looking at how many publications it has.