The extras

“After many failed attempts for MBBS, I eventually pursued a Bachelor’s in Biotechnology followed by a Master’s as per convention. Considering I lacked exposure to research, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a PhD, so in order to build my knowledge and get hands-on-training experience, I initially decided to apply for a dissertation at CCMB, Hyderabad. I wrote to a couple of professors, whose work I liked but didn’t receive any response. Nevertheless, I decided to go and meet them in person and ended up getting kicked out by the security guard. Just when I was about to lose all hope, I bumped into a colleague of mine who was working at CCMB back then. He helped me through the formal procedure and I ended up securing a JRF position in the institute, under Prof. Rajan Sankaranarayanan.

The best part about the laboratory I joined was that my colleagues never bothered about how much I knew but were more interested in knowing how keen I was to learn new things. Initially, when I joined, I felt I wouldn’t fit in and wanted to leave. My friends convinced me to stay and I can now say that they did the right thing. The situation changed within a month. I started enjoying my work so much that I made up my mind of pursuing a PhD in the same laboratory, come what may. Having secured the DST INSPIRE fellowship, I had the opportunity of going to another institute but I had already made commitments to my supervisor and so I decided to stay back. After a few months into my project, he encouraged me to apply for the PhD entrance examination of the institute, which only boosted my confidence of working with him even more.

My journey was quite enriching, to say the least. During my PhD, I had the chance of meeting and speaking to Prof. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, after which I applied for CSIR-NET and luckily cleared the examination without any preparation. I think, sometimes, it is not the knowledge that one has, but the right mindset and good company that add on to your success. Although my laboratory focused on core structural biology and my project entailed the same, I understood the importance of interdisciplinary sciences very early on in my PhD and did collaborative work with Dr. Sandhya Koushika at TIFR, Mumbai. In addition, I was selected by DST in 2018 to go to Germany for the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting which hosted about forty Nobel Laureates and…