Yours sincerely, A Rebel!

“I initially thought of taking a break after engineering to figure out what I wanted to do in the future. I went to Bengaluru to stay with one of my friends, who was working in the corporate sector. Seeing the life that she was leading, I realized I wasn’t cut out for it. This inclined me more towards pursuing a PhD.

I was quite ignorant about research life, which was a little embarrassing since my father also had a PhD degree. In IITK, I thought that I would have a personal office, my own living quarters and would do ground-breaking work from day one. But of course, I couldn’t be more wrong.

During my stay at IITK, I did raise my voice against some of the injustice done to the students. My first encounter in that context was when a new format of the qualifying examination was introduced from my batch onwards. The exam did not have any fixed syllabus, the people making the question paper were anonymous and the questions could be from any topic right from our college days. The policy was, if we failed the paper thrice, we would not be allowed to continue with our PhD programs. I failed that exam twice, along with the majority of my class! This jolted my confidence because I wasn’t used to failures and had no idea how to deal with the shock. Frustrated, I contacted the authorities and made them aware of the repercussions this exam pattern was having on the students. Luckily…