Reflections on my career as a student

I have been a student for the last twenty four years of my life.

If family anecdotes are to be believed, I started going to a school when I was around three years of age.

I started out being a slow learner who felt extreme unease in a public learning situation (i.e. a classroom), before around middle school I decided that getting recognized as a good student was the best way to earn social approval within the school system and also from family. This is when my grades started getting miraculously better.  A very motivating home-tutor who had seen some hope in me was a big factor. My hatred for the teacher's pets and snooty class toppers was another.  Throughout my career, I have observed that hatred, anger, disgust and such kind of emotions that tend to get labeled "negative" and are deemed as unhealthy or undesirable by our society, have been strong motivators for me.  I am sure I would have been diagnosed with autism or some other cognitive disorder if I had been a kid in a Western country.

I was a big reader since I was maybe eight and had read various kinds of knowledge books and encyclopedia before I decided to turn my attention to school text books. I also started writing and telling impromptu serialized stories to friends on the school-bus since maybe I was eight (yes my memory is kinda blurry, but my first novel, "The Adventures of Roberto the Explorer" was written around then. It's still in a diary that my mom keeps in her closet, ostensibly to show her grandkids.) My favorite one though is the one I made up for my friends on the school-bus. It was in Bengali and called, "Chang Buri". It was about a witchlike half-Chinese half-Bengali old woman who excelled in climbing coconut trees and teaching the baddies a lesson, usually in cunning and subversive ways.  The details however are lost to posterity as  this story was in the true Indian tradition, meant to be orally handed down, and no written record remains.

The major hurdle in the course of my quest for academic excellence was  math. Till I was twelve or so, I used to be very bad at mathematics. Most of my friends were faster at tables and doing sums in their head than I was. I hated math with a passion.  The very thought of having to work on a math problem would make me physically sick.  Two key things that helped to change this was a newfound passion for physics, and the changing nature of the math curriculum itself as we moved into high school.  I realized on looking at my first physics text, that math was essential to understanding the way things worked around us. This is the first time I saw some clear reason for doing math. Before that it appeared to me that all math was ever useful for was doing grocery lists and other such boring things.  Also math keeps getting more abstract and more logic driven as you go higher.  Before that it's merely a bunch of rules. Like Calvin of the eponymous comic strip series said, "Math is a religion I do not believe in".

People might find it slightly ironical then that I have invested ten years of my life in studying physics - given that I was by no accounts a math prodigy. Through training and attending very good schools, I have become very competent at it, and probably even better than a lot of people coming through similar setups. But I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I hadn't been raised in a culture that placed so much premium on quantitative abilities.  The rule bound things sometimes still annoy me - computer programming for instance, which I have noticed I tend to avoid although I am trained to be competent at it (the last time I coded was two years back when a research project demanded it).  The logical abstract thinking that higher math requires is more my kind of thing, though it's extremely hard to make a career out of it.   But what am I saying? Theoretical physics is not that far off, in terms of being hard to make a livelihood out of.  Although I believe I would have been good at it, if I had chosen instead to study say a  humanities subject, it would have been less satisfactory for me in some sense. The physical sciences reassure me in one very basic way - we are after objective, verifiable truths - things have clearcut answers (though these days real research has quite disabused me of this notion). This is somehow very important to me in an epistemiological sense.  Besides I greatly enjoy literature - sometimes it's good to have a passion that is not your profession. That helps to sustain it.

In maybe a few months, I will find myself in a situation that is totally alien to me. I will be out of school! and being a good student will cease to be the primary goal of my life. Even if I am in a postdoctoral research position doing science, my role will be significantly altered.  I am having to seriously consider and weigh my options before deciding on a future career path. Yet I know nothing really of the real world. I have friends who are bankers, software engineers, and business executives, but I know nothing much about what they do, how they do it, and whether I am cut out for what they do. I have been in school too long, and now academia seems like the only logical course to stick to.  But only 10% of the people who finish their PhD in my field can actually go on to become a tenured university professor. This means I might end up doing something in a few years that I had totally not envisioned. Becoming a professor is also a real lifetime commitment. As a graduate student, I am probably experimenting with just five years of my life. Not much harm could have come off it even if it turned out that I wasn't good at this. I always had the option of doing something else after that, and I would always have learned a little of something to take away from the experience. But as a professor I am committing myself to a lifetime of research and teaching. Will I be that good that long? Will I be able to create good science and be a motivating teacher for the rest of my life? That is so hard to decide.  Like they say, our sixteen year old selves chose for us what we are doing now.  There are no guarantees and certainties. It is slightly disconcerting, especially for someone whose talents are not clearly streamlined in one particular direction. Almost makes me want to sign up for another PhD program and be in school, learning and being a good student for the rest of my life.  At other times, it's just about surrendering to the Garden of Forking Paths.