My academic journey: Reflections as a first-generation kid

Part 1: The path to graduate school

I earned a Ph.D.! It’s almost unbelievable to the present postdoctoral scholar me. It’s certainly an unimaginable reality to that first-generation kid who had no clue about the future. Unbeknownst to me then, my defining moment was when I decided that I wanted to get into an IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology). The very idea of getting into an IIT was not mine (or my family’s). I owe it to my high school friend Pratik who started talking about the IITs and the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEEs) and how he wanted to pursue it. It was almost like an act of rebellion for me. To dream what Pratik was dreaming. To be able to dream big, to set myself apart, to not follow a path some loved one told me to, to be able to claim independence of thought and to be...different. I am writing this for all those first-generation kids who realize that their world is imposing restrictions on them, who realize the idea of boundaries is just a perception, who are thinking of breaking those boundaries and are setting goals to pursue dreams no one near and dear to them pursued. Obviously, in retrospect, putting it all this way seems very heroic. Seems very courageous. However, life unfolds gradually and not all days for a first-gen kid are an “act of rebellion.” It’s all about opportunities and being able to pursue them. A majority of the first-gen kids don’t have the privilege of being presented with opportunities like I did. Being in a big city like Pune, with friends such as Pratik who enabled me to think beyond my own boundaries of my own thoughts then. As I started writing, I realized I couldn't possibly finish this in one sitting. Neither do I have the time to be able to dedicate all my hours to this. However, I feel like I owe this to those unseen, unknown fighters and rebels who are, in the very now, striving to do something for themselves. 

 

As a kid who was bullied in school for being different, I got immense pleasure in aggravating those bullies by being weirder and more daring with every new goal I set for myself. I owe this attitude to myself. I have always had a loud personality. So, when I was bullied in school, I was lucky and blessed to have had it in me to give it back to my bullies. Not by physical force but by excelling in academia. It’s hilarious to me now how the little kid me thought I could own my bullies by being a nerd. Like who thinks that way?! I am so glad I did. Of course, I can't say if I owned my bullies or not, but it turned out to be quite advantageous and positive for me. All of this bullying and my reaction to it continued even after getting into an IIT. But before I talk about my IIT days, I want to mention my pre-IIT days when I was working extremely hard to prepare for JEE. 

I prepared for JEE for two years during my ten plus two or junior college as we called it. (The 10+2 system is a part of the K-12 education system, and equivalent to the International Baccalaureate and GCE Advanced Levels in the west. -Wikipedia). This was considered, back then, an appropriate amount of time to prepare for JEE. I won’t digress with how people have started preparing for JEE for 5-6 years in advance now. Wild! Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, two years seems like a very small amount of time. Even though JEE preparation time was just for two years, I lived a “mini-life” as our JEE mentors used to call it. I had started dreaming about this ideal world called an IIT and how life would be amazing. So from that standpoint, I had created a vision of the IIT world for two long years. That view was shattered when I went to college (IIT Guwahati). Turns out, when you put something or someone on a pedestal, chances are you will be majorly disappointed. I had this idealistic view of how an academic world would be full of bullied nerds like me and we would all live on one big happy island. To my disappointment, there were bullies in college too. That same rebellious kid came to life and I decided to "own" those bullies by pursuing higher education. Of course, that was not the motivation or the only factor that helped me pursue higher education. There was also a sense of pride, reinforced by the Indian culture aka Indian uncle and aunts who made me feel like a hero. There was also ego, arrogance, and an inflated sense of self all while I continued working hard and having the privilege of being presented with opportunities. It’s amazing how once you have even a little privilege, it snowballs into more and more opportunities. So that decision of the kid-me to get into an IIT, and my hard work to actually get into one, paved the way for another pivotal moment in college. My second-year internship!

 

During my second year when I was looking for internships, I landed up getting an internship opportunity at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). In retrospect, that opportunity was 90% luck and 10% my GPA, my persistence in applying/spamming to 100s of places, and my fear of missing out. In fact, some of the things that I was doing as a part of that 10% were actually hurting me. I was not personalizing my applications. I was applying to places that had no connection to what I was doing or wanted to do. I didn’t bother to ask how to frame things. I may have also blatantly copied the structure of the applications that were examples from seniors who bagged internship opportunities. I want to write it out there because I know there will be first-gen kids like me who will be doing the things I did and it's only because they don’t know better. I just got lucky. Most might not. Notice that I now have the ability to acknowledge my dumb luck and my mistakes while maintaining the stance that I worked very hard in doing the things I was doing. Life was not black and white, it was all gray. This is especially true for first-gen kids who are sometimes taught to push walls as a part of work hard exercise only to be rewarded with nothing. If you are first-gen reading this, don't hesitate to ask around. Moreover, after you have asked and worked on something, be unabashed about seeking critiques and feedback. I also know the dilemma of whom to ask. Go to the people in positions of power. This includes not only your immediate seniors who are themselves figuring things out but professors. So many of us first-gens don't think of asking for help. Do it! It's not a sign of weakness. It's the exact opposite. Can you believe I got a KAIST opportunity just by sending an email with my CV? There was no posting. No ads. I just enquired. 

The KAIST opportunity helped me in more ways than I thought it would. I realized it became easy to apply for internships in my third year. From then on, it was mostly a privilege to bank on previous credentials to continue seizing one opportunity after the other. KAIST internship led to Purdue Internship led to study abroad in France led to understanding the “first world” led to wanting to pursue higher education. (Of course, all while I continued to study for exams and continued getting good grades and playing the number game. I could write a whole new blog about how hypothetically all of that may have not mattered or how it was stupid etc. but I will know whether all of that helped create a perception of me in someone else's mind that lead to the opportunities I got.) Little did I know, a Ph.D. was going to yank me into an environment full of uncertainty, self-depreciation, feeling stupid, and feeling alone. In retrospect, I can’t be more thankful that I got the opportunity to experience graduate school!

Part 2: The Ph.D. Experience (work in progress)

 

The thing is, I was so used to riding on my privilege by the time I graduated from college, I had forgotten what it was to struggle. A Ph.D. is about struggle. Academia provides opportunities for you to think about the topics you really enjoy and plan things in that direction. Such an opportunity is both a gift and a curse in the academic world. A first-generation graduate student may not know how to think and plan. In fact, I didn’t realize this until I was too deep into the I want to be a faculty member dream. By that I mean when I really understood the academic hiring process and the factors that influence the possibility of you getting a tenure track position, I realized all the things I should have been doing during my Ph.D. including reading more, publishing more, strategizing more, writing more, and working more. The problem with such a realization is that more is a relative term, and rarely something is discussed in absolutes in graduate school. This is primarily because even professors may not know what research results they will find as such is the nature of research only to be exacerbated by the capitalistic nature of American academia. This bears a huge implication on the growth of a budding graduate student, let alone a first-generation kid, who may not understand the intricacies of the academic world. A few of such intricacies are listed below based on my experience and understanding of the engineering academic research world.

 

• Graduate students are expected to be independent without little explanation of what independence means.
•  Independence means you are free to search for theories from any area which can be relevant to answering a research question and you are free to propose a path to solve the problem with a logical explanation of that path. You are also free to use up all your time and efforts in doing so. In your early academic years, chances are however that you don’t know how to search for theories and how to choose a research methodology. Mind you, it's a methodology and not a method which in itself takes a long time for a graduate student to figure out alone if you do not have the right guidance. 
• If you can’t be your own teacher and student, academia is not for you.
• The academic world lives off of academic underachievement anxiety.
• So, given that you will feel the struggle of a lack of knowledge not only about the content but also the research strategies, you will not be able to progress in the earlier years of your Ph.D. as quickly as you thought you would. This results in a downward spiral given that it's highly likely you were an overachiever in academics.
• Ph.D. advisors are not incentivized to be good mentors.
• I was extremely lucky to have had an advisor who knew how to mentor well. Most graduate students aren’t fortunate to receive a good mentor.  Mentoring is an art and very few people know how to truly mentor someone even if it means they may not be able to achieve what they set out to achieve from you given that they had hired you in the first place.
• The weird part about academia is once you get a Ph.D. you have the power of giving PhDs to others.
• Data-scarce Academia is trying to compete with the data-rich Industry to make advancements in data science of course in the context of your research area.
• If you are a non-CS student, you will hear about the enigmatic AI/ML terms thrown around in your department and you will be mesmerized by the knowledge being thrown around casually in conversations without realizing that most of the people in your own department may not know about AI/ML as much as you think they do. 
•  CS knowledge is an implicit expectation without the path provided or resources made explicitly available to acquire it.
• You will notice that professors use academic terminologies that impress the vision of Program Directors and expect students to truly decipher the meanings of those terminologies.
• As an academic, you will always be underpaid but after a point, you won’t be hand to mouth.
• Every Ph.D. is different and not everyone puts in the same amount of effort to achieve the “Dr” title.
• A Ph.D. can make you feel very lonely as you are deciding to take on a path where you would want to claim you know the most about a topic which also means you will only find ears to listen but no mouths for words of advice except your advisor who may be a nice person if you are lucky like I was.
• Conferences initially seem like an opportunity to travel and visit a new place. However, it should be mostly treated as an opportunity to meet people and discuss ideas with them as a part of your job. 
• Reading is different from reading right.
• There is just so much to read! This feeling can be crippling when you come from a zero state of knowledge about the very area that interests you. 
• The way to deal with this feeling is to initially read your advisor’s work to try to get on the same page with them. However, this also needs to be balanced with reading about the things your advisor is currently talking about in the context of the current project that is funding you. Chances are your advisor is also relatively new to the current project from the perspective of not having answers to the problems (because that’s why they are interested in exploring the area!) 
• So, the key is to read about gaps in knowledge which means understanding what is currently known and what is not known in the current project.