How did you decide to come to IISER?
During my 11th and 12th grades, I was preparing for the NEET exam, but towards the end of my 11th grade, I realised that I didn’t want to become a doctor. I was exploring other options and was fortunate enough to have people in academia in my family who nudged me towards considering research as an option. In the summer between 11th and 12th grade, I interned at NCBS, where my job was to mark bees for study and clean a beehive enclosure. The tasks were basic, but I enjoyed them. It was nice to be a part of a larger research endeavour. I started looking into possible research institutes, and IISER was one of them. I had good chemistry teachers in school, so I came to IISER wanting to study chemistry. In the first year of taking courses from all four disciplines—Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Math— I found that I liked the physics courses a lot more, so I eventually picked physics as my major.
You talked about your internship at NCBS (National Centre for Biological Sciences), which you did before coming to IISER. This is something new because most people start internships after coming here. How did you think of doing an internship before coming here, and how did it help you?
This was definitely because I had people in my family with research backgrounds who could advise me. They told me that the only way to know if research was the right fit for me was to actually do research— doing an internship, involving oneself, going to a lab, and looking at the dynamics involved. Since I was on the medicine track, the natural transition was to do something in biology. I wrote to a few researchers at NCBS, and one professor told me they needed someone to take care of their bee enclosure. My job was to freeze bees, mark them, set them free and clean the hive. I didn’t get to learn much about the actual science— the correlation between the bees’ behavioural tendencies and certain neurological markers, which was the lab’s primary interest, but I did learn a lot about the process of research and what happens on a day-to-day basis in a lab. If there’s something I wish I had known when I was applying for internships, it is to ask the professor and the PhDs what an average day in the lab or the group is like. A research problem can sound super exciting and full of possibilities on paper, but more often than not, you have to clean a lot of metaphorical beehives before your research starts taking shape. Nothing wrong with that, of course- it can be one of the most enjoyable parts! But it’s important to know the reality of what you’re getting into and ask yourself if you’re ready for all of it.
You have had many transitions, and initially, you were thinking about pursuing medicine, which is more biology-oriented. Then, you thought about chemistry and finally chose to do physics. How do you think the IISER curriculum helped you to make that choice?
In the IISER curriculum, you can tell the difference between whether you like the subject for what it is and if it’s just that the course has great teachers. In school, a good teacher could make a huge difference in my inclination to study a subject. Here, there’s naturally a lot more self-studying and struggling through textbooks that leave proofs as exercises to the reader. As strange as the transition from being spoon-fed in school to being thrown into 1st-semester Mechanics (PHY101, the physics course in the first semester) was, it helped identify the topics I genuinely enjoyed learning about.
It’s good to see a girl in a field like physics because even though the number of girls pursuing a career in physics and math is increasing today, some still feel hesitant about it. So, how can we encourage more girls to study science, especially in fields like physics and math?
I feel like this definitely starts from the school itself. In the 10th grade, there’s often a general subtext that you’ll probably go down the NEET track if you’re a girl. There’s this strange notion that biology and some fields of chemistry are the “softer” sciences. Although nobody explicitly told me this, I had internalised this bias. The solution to this is, of course, doing away with this association of gender and the NEET-JEE binary. It’s easier said than done, but I think it’s already changing, slowly but steadily. In IISER, I think seeing more women in faculty positions and interacting with more women PhDs can be inspiring and empowering in itself. To achieve this, I completely support affirmative action to bring about a better gender ratio, especially in institutes like ours. Lastly, a large part of overcoming that hesitation comes from constantly reminding yourself that you deserve the opportunities you have and will make the most of them, just like anyone else.
How were your extracurricular experiences on campus? You were the LDS co-convener, and you were also in the Manthan core, so how did you manage, and did you enjoy it?
In retrospect, I did not participate in as many extracurricular activities as I should have. In fact, I picked Manthan because I simply liked writing, and I was trying to learn more about programming. I was trying to learn web design as a personal project, and it made sense to join Manthan to learn more about scientific writing and web design. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the people in Manthan and learned a lot from the seniors who were on the team. It also gave me a sense of community during the pandemic. Additionally, it wasn’t a very involved extracurricular activity. I wasn’t blocking a chunk of my day for it, and it worked very well with my schedule. For LDS, part of our tenure was online, so we had fewer events than we would’ve wanted to. The Friday night LDS debates that our seniors used to conduct are one of my best first-semester memories, and I wish we had continued the tradition during our tenure. However, I really liked the events that we did have, like Murder Mystery and the Discord debates. The months leading up to Murder Mystery were truly unforgettable, and I will cherish that semester as my most enjoyable and chaotic time on campus. That was so much fun.
What were your internships in physics and your final year thesis work?
In physics, I did an online internship at IISc in my first year because of the COVID lockdown. I did a reading project on the foundations of quantum mechanics and learned to use computational physics toolkits. I was motivated to learn about QM simply because I’d heard about quantum computing and thought it sounded super cool. It’s not the best motivation- but I’m glad I did it. My second summer was also online. I worked on a project with Prof. Kavita Dorai here at IISER Mohali, where I implemented the quantum Fast Fourier transform (FFT) on the IBM qiskit platform. I did my third summer under Prof. Urbasi Sinha at RRI (Raman Research Institute) in Bangalore. I’m from Bangalore, so it was another summer at home for me. There, I worked on error-correction protocols for quantum key distribution. I’m currently still working on this project. In my fourth summer, which was last year, I did an internship at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I worked on developing a variation of the Qubit ADAPT VQD algorithm modelled for the hydrogen anti-hydrogen dimer using a novel basis set. All of these projects had been primarily theoretical and computational. Naturally, I started my master’s thesis wanting to do computational work, but I was also interested in learning some aspects of experimental condensed matter physics because I am a product of online physics labs. The extent of my knowledge of electronics was dragging and dropping wires and ICs on online software. I realised that I couldn’t start applying for PhDs without having worked on an experimental project. My thesis advisor at Dartmouth College gave me the opportunity to work on spin qubits in NV centres in diamond on an EPR spectrometer. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
What would you like to say about your friendships and memories on campus with your seniors, juniors, and classmates?
So many memories. I’m no longer the person I was in my first year at IISER. We all grow and change with time, but I can confidently say that our growth has been positive. I owe it to my friends and to everyone I’ve had the chance to interact with over these last 5 years. Not to sound corny, but the memories you have in college, the good, the bad and the sleeping-at-7am-after-a-week-of-all-nighters really shape who you become. Looking back, I don’t regret any of it. Also, a big shout out to my friends Vinita, Marva and Pratha; I couldn’t have done it without them. The friendships that you make here are friendships for life. We might not get to meet for chai 4 times a day or take 10-minute study breaks to go on hour-long walks around the library, but the people here at IISER made me who I am today, and I’ll carry a part of them with me. That kind of culture is something that you see only in the IISERs.
Any advice to the upcoming batches?
The main piece of advice that I would give is to not let the competition get to you. Like our seniors and professors always tell us, the field of pure sciences is more of a marathon than a race. Competition was something that I personally struggled to deal with. For example, during internship application season, I would think, ‘Oh my God, everyone’s applying abroad. I also need to get an internship abroad. It has to be in the best university, the best field, the best professor. I need to get the best recommendation letters’. It’s very flippant to say it doesn’t matter because it does. Your grades, internships and recommendation letters matter, and they get you the positions you want, which has a cascading effect on your future prospects. But really, it’s one variable in an extremely unpredictable system. At the end of the day, it’s about your personal goals. If you believe that doing a project abroad will give you a better chance at a great PhD opportunity, put your best foot forward and try your very best to make it happen. If you believe that you can do your best science in a familiar environment so that you can channel all your energy into your project instead of dealing with the difficulties that come with moving to a new place, do it. Put your heart into it and make your effort shine through the quality of your work. Competition in academia is intangible, and things might not make sense at times. This is especially the case during PhD applications. But all we can do is soldier on and make sure that we enjoy the process as much as we can.
What are your future plans?
I will pursue a PhD in experimental quantum information at QuTech in TU Delft.
Lastly, what do you think about the research process? It can often be time-consuming and slow, and you may sometimes get frustrated about it. You have done multiple internships, so how did you go about that process?
Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out a way to imbibe the research process. It can be so slow and so deeply frustrating. It is a perfect incubator for imposter syndrome. The wins are infrequent, but when you get them, there’s no better feeling. We’re all here because we thrive off of academic validation in some form. Nothing wrong with that. But it’s also important to find a daily source of motivation. We all start working on a research problem with some idea of what we hope to see as an outcome. But on a day-to-day basis, we make infinitesimal steps towards this goal. You might have days where you manage to get through one paragraph in a paper. Your code, which was working perfectly well till yesterday, might suddenly decide to throw the most incomprehensible error, undoing weeks of work. But then, one day, everything clicks, and in the end, you see that you’ve come a long way in three months, or however long it takes to complete your internship. Everyone has a different pace, and it’s important to identify yours and be kind to yourself. As one of my professors said, “research takes time, and time is all we have.”
Interviewed by: Sophia Iyyu
Edited by: Asmita Ghosh & Soham Shannigrahi
Manthan 