Ups and Downs

“Although I did get through my medical entrance exams, I opted to study pure science consisting of the subjects- botany, zoology, and chemistry. Out of these three, chemistry was the only subject where I scored good without having to put much effort. Not to mention Breaking Bad, which I used to binge watch religiously during my college days, made chemistry look very cool as a field and sealed the deal for me.

However, like many others, I had to start my PhD in the middle of a pandemic and my project timeline had to be pushed back to a certain extent until we resumed normalcy. Nevertheless, it was a surreal experience!

My PhD project is aimed towards fabricating a new system of hydrogels using gelatin and using that as a scaffold to embed cells. I further plan on changing the properties of the scaffold using visible or UV light and observe the changes in cell behavior. This has a huge application in research geared towards scar tissue formation and can be extrapolated to cancer research. These platforms are cost effective and reduce the dependence of using animal models in certain fields.

No PhD journey is entirely smooth and I had my share of both ups and downs in this short period that I have spent in graduate school. One of my lowest lows was giving my presentation for the proposal defense. We were just coming out of a pandemic, and I had put in a lot of effort to…