Bringing you the personal accounts, the day to day happenings in the life of researchers across different Indian institutions. Email: phdsofindia@gmail.com
“My batchmates helped me with difficult coursework and even the basics of using a laptop. I was trying to learn science while learning how to belong in an environment that felt entirely unfamiliar.” @nitukumari24phdsofindia.medium.com/from-…
“My experience in the Master’s laboratory was difficult. I encountered toxicity and coercion, and it made me question how much power a research supervisor should have over a student’s life.”
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“Early in my PhD, I became obsessed with finding the big problem, the problem that would define my thesis. That pressure took a toll.” @arpitabiswas777phdsofindia.medium.com/one-q…
“For twelve years, I worked alongside Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on India’s SLV-3 programme. This was long before India became the space power we know today.”
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““My PhD did not follow the path I had expected. The environment in the laboratory I initially joined became difficult, and eventually I had to make the decision to switch laboratories.”
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“Academia has a strange tendency to glorify suffering. We hear stories of people sacrificing ten or fifteen years, their health, relationships and happiness, and somehow turn that suffering into evidence that they deserved their degree.”
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“There were sixteen students in our group, and I was one of only two who were neither employed nor paid. I was told that I wasn’t efficient enough to deserve payment. That stayed with me.”
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“I began my PhD thinking I would study marmots in Ladakh. I finished it having built a database of tens of thousands of squirrel records because permits failed, research questions changed and a pandemic made fieldwork impossible.”
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“The ceremony where I was supposed to receive my medal for standing first happened to fall on my wedding day. I couldn’t attend. So they brought the medal to my wedding and presented it to me there.”
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We talk a lot about building better science. We need to talk just as seriously about building kinder places to do it.
No degree, paper, fellowship or career is worth more than the person pursuing it.
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“ I worked through five Durga Puja during my six years of PhD. I worked through Christmas and many other holidays partly because that is simply who I am and also because work and research had become a kind of solace.”
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“I once wrote to a foreign university seeking data; though they couldn’t help, they did point out the grammatical errors in my email, a deeply discouraging experience.”
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“My father didn’t allow me to go to any of these places because being outside the state meant going far from home. “Girls shouldn’t be sent away for studies” – this was almost like our family’s unspoken law.”
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“Even when lockdowns were lifted, progress was fragile. With intermittent quarantines, I often returned to work to find my cell lines dead and weeks of work lost.”
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“There is an urgent need to stop viewing research in non-STEM disciplines as “non-research” as it does not align with the interdisciplinary goals of the NEP. This also slows advancement of critical understanding in terms of social change.”
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