Regaining Confidence

“Both my parents are into the teaching profession and therefore being in academics perhaps came naturally to me. During my Master’s, I did a project with a few of my friends which seeded the interest in me to opt for a PhD.

My interview in one of the top research institutes of India went fairly well and I got the laboratory of my choice. I couldn’t be happier. I was so content that I didn’t talk to anyone else, prospective colleagues or others about the environment in the laboratory before joining. There couldn’t have been a bigger mistake on my part. The entire campus, except me, knew that the laboratory was not a great place to work in.

Soon after, I realized my mistake. My supervisor would micro-manage a lot; she would call me incompetent if the experiments didn’t work at the first shot. There was a lot of unhealthy competition and gossip around which made the laboratory environment extremely toxic. I was shut off whenever I tried to pitch in new ideas and even rebuked for reading papers that weren’t published by my laboratory. To make it worse, the group meetings were a terror, she insulted students in front of everyone and showed biased treatments towards those she considered worthy. My confidence gradually shattered into pieces and I started believing that I wasn’t fit for a PhD.