Death by Insecurity
It was a little over a year back that I started my PhD journey at TIFR, Mumbai, starry eyed with a hundred different ideas of what I would pursue in PhD and what my life in TIFR would be like. I would be dishonest if I were to say that things have been exactly like I dreamt they would be. Having left engineering with an interest in developmental biology, I even surprised myself when I chose a lab working on Cellular Neurobiology over two other developmental biology labs I rotated in. But that’s the smallest of the surprises I’ve had. Very recently, I had to give a comprehensive exam presentation, what’s called Project 1 seminar at TIFR, on the field that my project is to be based on. This was unlike any presentation I had given in history because I was expected to have read research articles in the range of a few hundreds and know things in the field from the most basic level to the most advanced level, put them in context and understand what it means for my project. Not sur...