The MANDA Lab Odyssey

Laugh and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone.   -Ella Wheeler in the poem "Solitude" (1883) While this is a famous line that makes sense at a superficial level, my experience in life has taught me that this isn't true. When you want to complain about how things aren't going well and are generally negative, you'll find many people who will commiserate with you and allow you to vent. They might themselves vent to give you company. I find that people generally tend to be tolerant and sympathetic of the misery around them. This is somehow especially true in academia. People love to complain, and people love being in the company of those who complain. I myself got into such loops but have worked actively on myself to get out of such negativity cycles and focus on the positives. I have more work to do on this front still, but I am happy with the steps I've taken to achieve this.  Your "friends" are not your friends if they will not be genu...

I have 2 important postdoc papers to finish and publish, not to mention another paper I started as a PhD student. One of them has already gone through reviews at some good journals but needs some more revisions and work to get more insights into the mechanisms underlying the novel phenomena we had described fairly comprehensively. During my postdoc, I also generated data for several other projects that have now been taken up by other postdocs in my former postdoc lab. So I anticipate some papers to come out of those efforts as well, but what is within my control are these two papers that I am responsible for. For my faculty colleagues reading this, you probably already know how this has gone during my first three years as a faculty member, given the extreme amounts of multitasking one has to do (the postdoc to PI transition is hard for this reason). I was unable to get the needle moving on these papers for 3 years... until now.  As I was grappling with this issue, one of the first ...

I received some information last week from PJN about a concert that was happening at ISB by T. M. Krishna. I knew of T. M. Krishna, the activist, and had briefly listened to his music on Spotify but never really paid much attention. I decided to attend this concert out of curiosity and also because I thought my wife, a trained carnatic singer, would enjoy it. It would also be a good outing for my music-loving mom who was visiting us.  I will try to keep this short but when people say "I am not political" or "I keep politics out of my work", it is not really the flex that people think it is. Why I say this will be apparent in a bit.  T.M. Krishna started off with a Tyagaraja composition that is not sung very often. It was immediately apparent that we were in the presence of a top-class musician. I am an amateur western classical pianist. I attended some carnatic concerts as a child but found them boring. I preferred western classical music which is rich in harmony an...

While I've openly shared troubles with obtaining funding for the lab on academic social media, I remain optimistic that one of the two grants that are currently under consideration will get funded. We will also apply for more this year. While I see many posts on Twitter about how frustrating the grant writing experience is, I actually enjoy writing grants for the sole purpose of refining my ideas and making them more concrete. So I don't mind continuing to apply until we find some success. This post however is about something different.  In the three years of our existence, students have gone in and out of the lab. In the initial few years, I accepted applications very liberally thinking that it was my duty to help whoever came to me but it turned out to be a very counterproductive exercise. I ended up spending tens and hundreds of hours trying to motivate a few students who inherently had very different goals from what they told me in our initial meetings.  Even more pro...

 This post was triggered by tweets such as the one quoted here:  https://x.com/mnwsth/status/1800190073973137829. The complaint can be summarized as: ~Rs 35k for a PhD stipend is low. It is a full-time job, so why not pay PhD students similar salaries as the industry? PhD students bring patents and publications and help with improving institutional ranks. US PhD stipends allow us to support a family, own a car, and have a great time. As someone who did a PhD in a small-ish university town in the US and lived in the US for 12 years, I'd like to debunk a few of these claims.  First and foremost: a PhD is really an apprenticeship. The first 2-3 years are spent on exploring topics, learning new skills, with a huge time investment from the mentor (ideally, whether or not this happens everywhere is a matter for another debate). People online have been responding to this by saying that "Oh, even at Google you have to spend some time picking up new skills". Yes, sure. However,...

source: https://www.surepayroll.com/resources/blog/setting-goals-for-the-new-year All considered, 2023 was a productive year for the lab. We submitted several grant proposals (unsuccessfully so far, but I count submissions as a success), a couple of conference papers, one review paper for a journal, and brought a preregistration to 90% completion (expecting to register the document in Jan 2024). Some of these should be published in 2024.  We hired some talented and motivated RAs, one of whom went on to convert to our MS by research program. 2/4 students who sat for placements have gotten their dream job offers. I'm sure the other two will also land something good within the next several months. This is also a positive outcome given how tough this placement season was across the country. One of the offers was a PPO and the work done by the student at his internship was based on the research he is doing with us. For prospective students reading this, this is a good example of how und...

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_machine#/media/File:Las_Vegas_slot_machines.jpg Academia is replete with failures with occasional high dosage rewards. This is not dissimilar to the strategy used in casinos to keep people addicted to the game. The DBT-India Alliance decision to me was a shocker given the feedback I got during the interview. The panel concluded with the following words "Your proposal is sound for the most part, we just have a few final comments" and proceeded to give me advice on my IRB application template and consent forms that I had sent them. During the interview, I had accidentally drawn on the projector screen instead of the white board, so when I said my goodbyes to them, I apologized once again for drawing on the projector screen and the chair of the panel replied "Don't worry, we will take it out of your fellowship". Everybody laughed, I thanked them once again, and left the room feeling quite happy about how everything went.  ...