It all started with an encyclopaedia.
I don’t remember exactly how old I was then, but I was definitely in the range of 8-10 years old (so, around 20 years ago). I have a vivid memory of sitting with my brothers on a sunny afternoon in our parents’ Nagpur flat and excitedly turning the pages of this brand-new DK encyclopaedia that my dad had bought. Our nerdy brains marvelled at the beautiful illustrations and the astonishing amount of information written on those white, glossy papers that covered a vast range of topics. One topic that caught my eye was astronomy. I was so enamoured by everything shown in that section that over the next year or two, I kept reading and re-reading the same words about our sun and the universe over and over again. Around that time, one evening when my eldest brother and I were standing on the terrace, we both looked up at the sky, and he told me about black holes. ‘Nature is fascinating’, I thought to myself.
Almost every kid is fascinated by space. For me, the fascination with space that I had always had as a kid turned into a career choice. Several choices and a lot of hard work later, I am pleased to say that now I have a PhD in Astrophysics (particularly, in the area of strong gravitational lensing). I am Dr Shruti Badole!
I am extremely lucky to have been able to do my PhD with my incredible supervisor Dr Neal Jackson at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA), the University of Manchester. He is the kindest person I have met in academia, and his patience, knowledge and support have immensely helped me throughout my PhD journey. Here’s a tip for aspiring PhD students: your supervisor and your relationship with them (and not how prestigious the university is) are going to be the most important factor in your PhD. It is better to work with a kind supervisor you have a positive relationship with in a ‘less famous’ university than with a toxic supervisor at say Harvard/Oxbridge/all those universities that people think you are a genius for getting into.
The first year
Moving thousands of miles away from home for your career to a city where you know almost no one is not easy. After arriving in Manchester, I found my first comfort zone in the form of my first year housemates, Georgia and Daiana. The three of us got along very easily and our friendship blossomed quickly. In spite of the busy schedules of all three of us, we managed to spend a lot of time together (be it in the kitchen or outside in the city) and made countless memories. Thanks to Daiana, I also made a few friends outside my department! My Freshers’ Week (the first week I spent in Manchester and also the week when the university organizes a lot of social activities and when the university clubs advertise themselves) was incredible and so much better than I had expected!
Within my first two days since the term officially started, Neal gave me a short introduction to radio interferometry and gravitational lensing. He also introduced me to his other students – his then-PhD student Philippa and his then-MSc student Shruti. The day I met them, I also got introduced to a special JBCA lensing group tradition: going to a superb pub called Sandbar, where we would have informal discussions about our research over a cup of tea/coffee or a pint of whatever drink you fancy. The discussions would, somehow, almost always slowly venture towards holidays and politics! Ending the ‘lensing lunch’ (as Philippa and I call it) with politics was so common that this one time I was genuinely astonished when we did not end up discussing politics (cough, Brexit, cough)! Philippa and Shruti are both lovely people; we became friends quick and are still friends today. Shruti was the first Indian friend I made in Manchester. She is not just Indian but also a Maharashtrian (i.e. from Maharashtra, the state I hail from). It felt good to get an opportunity to speak in Marathi and discuss/do desi things with someone in a foreign country! Philippa has always been like an elder sister and I look up to her. She has not only been an excellent colleague throughout my PhD, but also a dear friend, and I am very grateful to her for her support.
Every year in September, my department throws a welcome party for all the new postgraduate students (the party is attended by everyone of course, not just the new students!). It was a nice way to get to know other new PhD and MSc students. Being the introvert I am, I did not talk to a lot of new people, but I did make a friend: Eunseong. She was in the same year as me and is probably the sweetest person I know. I also met Abir, a postdoc who is also from India! Some time in my first year (can’t remember exactly when), I also became friends with Duncan, another PhD student from my year. Extremely hard-working, he was also Philippa’s classmate when they were MSc students.
My PhD started in September 2017 and the first deadline was in January 2018: we (first year PhD students) were supposed to submit a literature review report, and also give a 10 minute-long presentation about it. We weren’t expected to start ‘real research’ until after our literature review. So, until December, I spent time reading about the intricacies of lensing and poring over at least 50 research papers! Traditionally, PhD students in the UK do not have to do any course as part of their programme, but since I was new to radio interferometry, I attended a course called ‘Introduction to Radio Interferometry’ that was taught to MSc students by my supervisor. It was a great experience learning something new and interesting without the pressure of studying for exams! I managed to write a good report and also enjoy a pleasant Christmas at two family friends’ (a couple I am very close to) house in London. I was very nervous about my literature review presentation, but thankfully it went well (I think?).
Speaking of Christmas: every year, my department hosts a Christmas party, usually in the beginning of December. Apart from the usual elements such as pizza and alcohol, it also entailed a ‘the best Christmas jumper’ contest (also the worst!), a quiz, secret Santa and also a bake off! Looking at the pictures from that party, I think I probably spent most of the time there with Shruti, Eunseong, Philippa, Naomi and Abir, being the introvert ‘kid’ who was too nervous to talk to new people, lol.
Another special event happened in winter: I, with my research group, visited the iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory (which ‘belongs’ to my department)! It houses two telescopes: the Mark II and the Lovell Telescope, that happens to be the third-largest steerable radio telescope in the world! The first time I saw Lovell, I gasped with wonder at its sight. JBO was established in 1945 and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site! On our trips to JBO, we would usually sit in a room and work until 5pm. One thing that stood out to me was the library that housed physical copies of astronomy journals! Now that’s a sight you don’t get to see often!
I kickstarted my first PhD project in November 2017. It’s called LBCS (which stands for LOFAR Long Baseline Calibrator Survey), a survey of the northern sky that aims to find objects that can be used to calibrate observations made using the international stations of the LOFAR telescope. I know this might be a lot of jargon for most of you, so I will not go into the details here (I might write another blog post, in future, where I talk about my research projects)! I say my expertise is strong gravitational lensing, but this was not a lensing-related project. It inched more towards hardcore, technical radio interferometry. It was a little intimidating in the beginning, but as time passed, I started to understand it and know what I was doing! The project had started in 2015 (the first research paper related to it can be found here) and ended last year (I am the second author on this new paper, which can be found here).
Since I was working on LOFAR data, I got an opportunity to go to Leiden (Netherlands) to attend a week-long workshop on LOFAR. I was very excited, as it was my first work trip (and that too to continental Europe!). Prior to that, I had attended a LOFAR workshop organized by my department, where I learned a little about how to analyse data from that telescope. In the Leiden workshop, I worked on implementing the techniques I had learned in the previous workshop to analyse a different dataset. There I also met many people whom I ended up collaborating with until last year. Thankfully, I also got a few opportunities to explore the lovely city of Leiden. After the workshop ended (Friday), I went to explore Amsterdam on the weekend. Another incredible city!
Around this time, Neal introduced me to the second project, a study of a radio-quiet quasar named SDSS J0924+0219 using the VLA telescope. Before I started my PhD, he had submitted a telescope proposal to observe this quasar. His proposal was accepted after I joined, and he decided to hand over the reigns of the project to me! He taught me how to submit the ‘scheduling blocks’ that gave the telescope operators information about the object and the telescope settings we wanted. After submitting it, we began the waiting for a thing most precious to researchers: data!
A month after the Leiden workshop, my research group and I attended EWASS (European Week of Astronomy and Space Science), a week-long astronomy conference that was attended by astronomers from all over the world. It was held in Liverpool and was the first conference I have attended in my life! I attended the conference for two days and got to see a lot of incredible talks by astronomers working in my field. The highlight for me was seeing Sherry Suyu, a strong gravitational lensing researcher whose papers I had read and admired while working on my literature review! I also serendipitously happened to meet my MSc supervisor, whom I hadn’t seen in 1.5 years! I did not present anything in the conference because I had no research to talk about, but Philippa did, and as expected, her talk was amazing! The conference dinner was held in the majestic Liverpool Cathedral, where we also got a chance to interact with (and have dinner with) a few PhD students from other universities.
By the end of the conference, we got some good news: our data for SDSS 0924 was ready to be retrieved! Thus began my long journey on this wonderful project that is now my favourite. After 4 months of work, I had made decent progress on the project, enough to be able to present the results so far in a conference. I got an opportunity to do so in a gravitational lensing conference I attended in Milan in September 2018! It was an incredible experience where I got to see talks by many eminent researchers working in the area of gravitational lensing.
A week prior to this conference, I was in the Netherlands, working with my LOFAR Long Baseline Working Group colleagues in ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Our group used to meet every few months for a week (we call them ‘busy weeks’) in different institutes that were connected to the international stations of LOFAR (I have attended the busy weeks in ASTRON, Leiden and Dublin). These were intense weeks when we, astronomers (based in institutes in different parts of Europe) working on LOFAR long baseline data, would meet in person, sit together and work, and discuss our progress. It was the same group that I had met earlier in Leiden. The main agenda of our group was to develop the LOFAR long baseline pipeline, a pipeline that takes raw data of objects observed using the LOFAR telescope as input, calibrates it and forms images of the objects. This pipeline also uses the LBCS catalogue. I did not work directly on the pipeline, but I carried out some diagnostic tests for the LBCS. As mentioned earlier, this project is not related to lensing; however, the pipeline can be implemented to study gravitationally lensed objects observed using the international stations of LOFAR.
The second year
In the first half of the first year of my PhD, when I was leading a care-free life (since I was just starting my research), I often wondered ‘why do people say PhD is stressful? It’s not stressful for me at all’. HAHA. HAHAHAHHA. God, what was I thinking, really? So naive, Shruti?! Fast-forward to my second year, I was anxious and irritated inside, all the time. This realization just suddenly dawned on me one fine day, and that is when I knew I am deep inside the PhD-stress pool.
At this point, I was working on two projects at the same time. ‘I am going to finish these two papers very soon’ was my constant chant, to myself and to others. At one point, I decided to let LBCS take a backseat and concentrate on 0924. Apart from this one week I spent in ASTRON in the winter of 2018, I was working full-time on 0924. A month after that week, in December 2018, our ALMA proposal to observe this object had been accepted (0924 — the data I was working on so far was VLA which covers high radio frequencies. ALMA covers even higher frequencies that span submillimetre wavelengths). At this point, we did not know how long it would take to get the ALMA data, so we decided to just focus on the VLA, write the paper for that and decide what to do for the paper (with regard to whether to talk about ALMA in the same paper or in a separate paper) after we get the ALMA data.
In February 2019, almost ten months after I started working on the 0924 project, I wrote and circulated to my collaborators the first draft of my paper, purely based on the VLA data analysis! I was so glad to finally reach this stage, even though I knew that this was just the first of many iterations to come! Within two weeks, I received comments by my collaborators on the paper. I don’t remember my exact feelings then, but I remember that by this time, I was at a low point in my PhD. My progress was slow, I was completely exhausted, and no matter what I did, I still felt like I was stuck in the same place. Fortunately, I spoke to Neal about this during one of our lensing lunches, and he assured me that this is the phase that usually all PhD students go through when they are at the mid-point of their PhD, and also before they are about to submit their first research paper. His words really helped, as they made me think that feeling like the way I did is completely normal, and I should not feel guilty about it.
Based on my collaborators’ comments, I updated the paper and recirculated it to the collaborators in May.
On the social front, I was leading a happy life. By then, I had made more friends in the office. Beth, the super-smart radio-interferometry goddess of the Sun, Stars and Galaxies group and also my desk-neighbour, was in the same year as I, so we shared the ‘let’s cry about our PhDs together’ bond. We are very close friends now, and I am happy that we have come so far from being the introvert students who did not talk to each other during the first week of our PhD! Naomi, as usual, was the sunshine of our office. She was a year senior to me and was in the same research group as Beth. Originally from Ghana, she came to Manchester to pursue her PhD, and has two little daughters who lived in Ghana while she was in Manchester! Roke, a clever Spaniard in the SSG group, used to enthral us with his stories and pictures of the many hikes (and rock climbing!) he used to go on. He is also a massive geek who spearheaded a project named Mancunian Balloonian (do check out its very cool video here!). One fine afternoon when Beth, Roke and I were procrastinating on work, we came up with the idea of joining two spare desks in our office to make a ‘ping pong table’. Roke then ordered 4 ping pong rackets and a set of ping pong balls, and our office ended up being the centre of attraction for all grad students! We also had a bunch of bean bags kept in the middle of the office; someone named this space ‘The Pit of Procrastination’ for obvious reasons. Good old days!
This post will be incomplete if I do not mention my boyfriend. His love, care and support for me for the past few years have had an immeasurable impact on my mental health and I cannot imagine what the past few years would have been like without him!
I also had 3 Indian friends: Shankar, Sush and Deepika. Shankar, a cosmology PhD student, was a year below me and had started studying in Manchester as an MSc student the same year that I joined. Sush also completed her MSc when I was pursuing my first year. Deepika, a strong lensing colleague, was a new MSc student, who was working under the supervision of Neal. Together we bonded over our desi-ness, a bond whose celebration was obviously incomplete without the biryani party the four of us had at Shankar’s place!
The third year: pre-pandemic
The 0924 project was initially supposed to be small; Neal had said the paper would probably be 6-7 pages long. This was when only VLA was in the plan! With ALMA, the project took an interesting turn, and we got to study another aspect of the quasar that we were not able to study using only the VLA data. After a few more rounds of circulating the paper (that now also included the ALMA data analysis) to the collaborators, a really long anxiety-ridden period of desperation when all I wanted to do was just finish this paper, and a year and half after I started working on the project, I FINALLY submitted my first ever first-author paper to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society! It was such a relief, and the timing was also perfect because I had a trip planned to Prague literally the day after I submitted! I remember that one of the first things Roke said to Neal after I submitted (I had submitted in the office in their presence) was something on the lines of ‘she kept talking about this paper for a long time!’. 😀
I made two more friends that year: Mariam and Tom. Mariam was a first year cosmology PhD student then. A really friendly person, she is British-Pakistani and was, at least then, the only other woman of South Asian descent doing a PhD in JBCA. Like Mariam, Tom, an extremely nice and interesting person, was also then a first year cosmology PhD student.
After a relaxing break in Prague, I resumed working on LBCS for a month and half. Towards the end of November, around a month after I submitted the 0924 paper, I received the comments from the anonymous referee, and they were…. a lot. Around 40 in total, including the minor and the not-so-minor. The referee wanted us to remove a part of the paper and implement a whole new methodology, which entailed me learning how a certain python module worked. The comments were very helpful and ended up making our paper a lot better (and if I am allowed to be a little vain, very good), but back then, I was just exhausted and desperate to put a full stop to this paper. A year and half of effort, and yet it never seemed enough. Welcome to the world of research!
We were given 6 months to implement the referee comments, which meant a deadline of end of May 2020. I was going to India for a month in December. I knew it would not take 6 months to implement the comments, so I decided to have a relaxing break in India, and deal with the comments after coming back. Things went as planned, and I resumed another anxiety-ridden phase where I, once again, became desperate to finish this paper for good.
Around two months after I came back from India (March 2020), the pandemic, that had just seemed to come to the surface in January, gained a foothold almost everywhere on the planet, and England went into a lockdown.
The weeks leading up to the lockdown were strange, to say the least. Like everywhere else, COVID had become the ‘talk of the office’. The word ‘social distancing’ was heard now and then. The handwashing process had become more intense, and I had started getting alarmed on hearing even a little bit of coughing. Around two weeks before the lockdown, when I was at my desk on a Friday afternoon, I decided that I would start working from home for a bit. I packed a few (not all) notebooks into a cardboard box I had under my desk, took my laptop bag, stood up and started walking towards the door. I suddenly stopped, looked back at my desk and thought to myself ‘who knows how long this pandemic is going to go on for?’, and then proceeded to pack ALL my notebooks into the box. I am very glad I did it, because on the following Monday, the university sent us all an email declaring that it’s going to close down the offices and labs the following day, and that we were all supposed to work from home for an indeterminate period of time. I had all the important work-related things I needed at home, so thankfully I did not have to rush into the office to collect my things. Around a week later, England went into its first lockdown. The first of many more to come. Little did I know that that Friday afternoon I packed my things was one of the last days of my PhD I worked in the office.
So, the work from home life began. Discord groups for the department students were formed so that we would be able to stay in touch. I had never been good at WFH. NEVER. So understandably, it was not an ideal situation for me, and I ended up being very unproductive for the next two weeks. I slowly got used to it, thankfully, and managed to finish addressing the referee comments for my 0924 paper by mid-April! The paper got accepted for publication soon after the submission of the revised manuscript! My joy and relief knew no bounds when I saw that email. I screamed with joy, immediately took a screenshot of the email and posted it on my office discord group, adding a long emotional message. I was happy, but also sad at the same time because this is not how I had envisioned the day I would get the acceptance email. I had imagined that I would scream at my desk instead! That my friends would come around me and celebrate, and that we all would head to a pub after work for celebratory drinks! Well, not everything goes the way you want it to, does it?
The PhD continued. I resumed my LBCS work. I started working on another LOFAR project: a study of two lensed quasars that were observed using the international stations of LOFAR. The images for this project were made by other students (undergraduate) using the LOFAR long baseline pipeline I mentioned earlier. Our big office in-person reunion finally happened in September 2020, with us all sitting in a circle in the beautiful Castlefield, making sure we don’t get too close to each other (thanks, COVID). Our group continued staying in touch. We have had office Zoom calls, and one of my favourite memories is watching with my office friends the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars!
The fourth and final year: still WFH
A very special thing happened in October 2020: Neal emailed me saying that Paul Schechter, a legendary astrophysicist who discovered a well-known function that was later named Schechter luminosity function, had read my paper and said to Neal that he thought it was excellent! Sure, now I am a doctor and all, but if there is one highlight in my PhD I have to choose, it would be this one!
Around this time, I also started feeling the pressure to start writing my thesis. I was already working on my research that was stressful enough, so I did what every good PhD student does: ignore the thesis (sarcasm, just to be clear). My hard deadline to submit my thesis was September 2021, so I decided to wait until December 2020 to start writing my thesis, so that I could focus on my research instead. In December, I started working on another project that was based on the study of 45 radio-quiet quasars observed using the VLA. Neal now had a new MSc student named Thomas (I call him Tommi, because that’s his name on discord), who was also working on the same project; I studied 23 of the 45 objects, while Tommi studied the other 22. Everyone in the university was still supposed to work from home, so Tommi ended up doing his entire MSc from home. We were in regular touch on discord since we were working on the same project, and we have become such good friends that it’s difficult to believe that we have met in person only once! He is now doing a fancy data engineer job in Manchester, but we still joke about aliens being responsible for the low radio emission in radio-quiet quasars, and about earning lots of money, so we can build our own radio interferometer. Well, the sky is the limit!
That December also holds the record for being the first time I experienced a proper burnout. I guess that’s what 3 years and 3 months of doing a PhD does to you. I had absolutely no motivation to do any work, and I used to just sit and be unproductive. I know it ‘sounds’ like laziness, but it was not. I have felt lazy plenty of times before, but I had never felt this level of exhaustion and demotivation. I wanted to just go and hide somewhere, forget about work, and also hoped that my colleagues would forget about me. Thankfully, I took a little break, which ended up helping a lot.
Many more months of anxiety passed, and my LOFAR paper, the paper for the project which I thought was ‘simple’ when I first started it, FINALLY got accepted. The paper was the result of efforts of many students. I worked on an important aspect of one of the two objects we studied, and also took care of the general things as well as the referee comments. While the work involved in the LOFAR paper was much lesser than in 0924, there was greater pressure this time to finish the paper as soon as possible: different people in our LOFAR collaboration were working on a total of 10 papers, and our plan was to release them all on arXiv on a single day (we call this a ‘paper splash’) and organize a press release. Why a press release? Because this was a big deal! There hadn’t been many high-resolution studies of objects at frequencies as low as 150 MHz, so our research was path-breaking for low-frequency radio astronomy. Furthermore, it was not easy to work with data from the international stations of LOFAR, hence the pipeline that my group developed was a very important step (and so was the LBCS).
Our group’s work officially came to fruition last year when we released those 10 research papers on arXiv: 1 paper on the pipeline, 1 on LBCS and the rest based on the science carried out using the pipeline. I was on 3 of these papers, one of them being my previously-mentioned first-author paper on two gravitationally lensed quasars observed using LOFAR. There was considerable media interest in the story, and our work was also featured in the 6 pm BBC News! I also got to speak to Dr Becky, an astrophysicist based in Oxford, for her YouTube channel named ‘Dr Becky’, and was also interviewed by the STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council)! The papers got published in a special edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The press release happened in August 2021. By this time, I was neck-deep into the well of thesis writing! My submission deadline was the month after! What had started as a slow process in December was now an ultra-fast one, because that’s how PhD students roll around deadlines. I will probably write a separate post about my thesis-writing and PhD viva, but to summarize: IT. WAS. FRIGGING. STRESSFUL. I mince no words when I say that 2021 was the most stressful year of my life. By this time, my eating habits were in absolute shambles, I had lost a considerable amount of weight and my standard response to ‘how are you?’ was ‘stressed’. My fridge was often full of ready meals, because who has time to cook when you have a thesis deadline?!
On 30th September 2021, after 4 years of stress, and good and bad days (and 1.5 years of working from home and being physically isolated from my JBCA friends whom I missed), I finally submitted my PhD thesis.
Contrary to what I was expecting, it all felt anti-climactic, probably due to the exhaustion of four years! I was not particularly happy with my thesis. It was not bad; Neal had told me that my writing was good. But I was not happy with the fact that I did not have the time to address a lot of important comments that Neal had given me on my first draft. Nevertheless, as they say, ‘a good thesis is a finished thesis’. Examiners almost always ask you to make some changes, so it is perfectly fine if the thesis is not perfect (honestly, what thesis ever is?). I decided to not worry about the comments, and deal with them when the time comes. Now was the time to take a well-deserved, a truly well-deserved break. What better place to take a break in the UK than the Scottish Highlands? So there I was, relaxing in an idyllic Knoydart village, satisfied that the major part of the whole process was over!
I passed my viva on the 15th December 2021! After a completely remotely-held viva, I became an unofficial doctor! I had always imagined myself crying tears of joy after passing my viva, but again, it all felt anti-climactic. I just felt exhausted, more than anything else, although this might have got something to do with the fact that I had barely had any sleep the night before my viva (1 hour!) and I also had a job interview the day after. I was genuinely so nervous about my viva that I had not told many people about it beforehand, not even my family (except one cousin who has a PhD too)! I always had ‘what if I fail?’ thoughts, because for a long time, no matter how hard I worked, how many reports and papers I wrote, how many things I learned, I always felt that I was not good enough to have a Doctorate. Honestly, I still have those thoughts a lot of times, but I have become slightly better at taming my mind when it starts thinking like this. Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed my viva, once I got over the initial jitters that lasted 20 minutes. My examiners were absolutely incredible and kind, and never made me feel like I am an idiot even when I didn’t know the answer to a question right away. The viva lasted 3 hours 40 minutes! Definitely one of the longest PhD vivas in the history of my department!
Very soon after addressing the examiners’ comments and submitting my revised thesis, I got the official award letter. That was it. This is what the past 4 years, 7 months have culminated in. All the tears of joy and also sadness led up to this one moment I got the letter that read ‘Dear Miss Badole, I am pleased to inform you that your award for the degree of PhD has now been confirmed‘.
Looking back, I think of all the times I kept saying to myself and to my friends, ‘I just want this to be over. I’m tired’. And I said this a lot. I am not alone in this. Every PhD student goes through this. Every single one. Be it family, friends, acquaintances or employers, people only see the final products when they talk to us. They see the papers we published, the thesis we wrote, the articles about our work that appeared in the media, the posters we made, the presentations we gave, the interviews we gave to fancy newspapers and channels, the fancy title of Dr we get to put in front of our names. What they don’t see are the hours of hard work we put in to get those results. The hours we sat in front of our computers, sometimes really having fun and enjoying what we do, and sometimes frustratingly thinking really hard and frantically pressing buttons on the keyboard to debug a code or solve a problem. The hours when we toiled, only to later realize that what we were doing all along was wrong and have to go back to square one. The hours we spent dealing with negative energy from other people. The tears of joy sometimes, but also sometimes tears stemming from frustration and anxiety. The hours we put ourselves down, constantly comparing ourselves to others and thinking we are not good enough. The days when we felt really positive and happy, and the days when we felt utterly, completely hopeless and wondering if this PhD would ever end (and often, wondering if doing this PhD was the right decision in the first place).
I am probably stating the obvious here, but all PhD students don’t have the same experience. There are many people who don’t look back at their PhD days with fondness, while there are many who do. I know how lucky I am when I say that, in spite of all the downs I have faced through the journey (whether they are tangible, like not getting results, or mental, like feeling like I am not good enough), this PhD has been the best phase of my adult life. Did I enjoy everything during this phase? Hell no. But I learned a lot, got to do what I have been wanting to do for a long time (i.e. study extragalactic objects), learned that no matter how hard things seem, it’s possible to see the light at the end of the tunnel, had an overall positive experience in spite of the extreme anxiety I have felt at times, and most importantly, I met incredible people along the way, people whom I hope I stay in touch with for the rest of my life.
My graduation ceremony is yet to happen, but for all practical purposes, this unique journey, like this really long article, has now officially come to an end. The 8-10 year old Shruti had absolutely no idea this was going to happen, so if there is one thing I can say to her, I will say this: you will be signing up for one hell of a ride!
Symphonies of a lifetime 
This post was so inspiring to read! Congratulations on finishing your PhD:) I loved your journey and all the emotions associated with it! I also like the pic of the strong lensing conference in Milan, it’s got such an aesthetic academia feel.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you so much! 🙂
LikeLike