My Journey from IIT to Econ PhD
As I reminisce about a past life, I see the narrow streets of Kalu Sarai (South Delhi) as the famous hub of coaching institutes bustling with JEE-aspirants making their way across the roads discussing the latest integral they were grinding in class or maybe the odd chuckle at how they bombed the last “test series”. I know that it’s a quintessential Indian experience because I cannot recount this tale to anyone who’s grown up in the US and not get a stink-eye. That in some ways I was manufactured in one of those factories with the sole purpose of clearing the standardized test called the Joint Entrance Examination. As a high-schooler in India, this is what success was synonymous with. Long story short, I was one of the few who were deemed “fit” to be granted admission to one of the IITs and soon after I found myself at IIT Bombay as a rather air headed undergraduate.
The campus really was more of an alien colony in the middle of the Mumbai metropolis, situated between a lake and a hill. It was all fenced up and resembled a fortress much more than a college. I did feel like an impostor most of the time that I was there, as I found most people I met to be far more talented than I was. I think that’s the best thing that being at an IIT offers, just a constant revolving door of inspiring individuals. During my time at IIT, while I met some amazing engineers and technologists, I also met filmmakers, athletes, entrepreneurs and even met a few people who were making bank playing poker online. And hence my feeling of inadequacy in my early years. I was a undergraduate in the Mechanical Engineering department. Why I mention this sort of in the middle is because I do not think my particular degree is all too relevant. What your undergraduate degree says about you and your interests, is honestly very little and you are always in danger of taking it too seriously if you have studied in India.
Between the thermodynamics and the manufacturing processes classes, I realized that I was not meant to be a mechanical engineer in the slightest. I was however intrigued by systems and how we analyzed systems using mathematical setups. That aspect of modeling stuck by me as I struggled my way through coursework. In the process I met some brilliant professors though, across the spectrum of conventional taskmasters to the bohemian dreamers. I had absolutely no clue what life after graduation was going to look like, but towards my later years at IITB I did decide to take some courses out of curiosity. One of them was Statistical Thermodynamics and another was Introduction to Systems.
These courses sparked my interest in academia for the first time as I started thinking about applying these ideas in the field of Economics and how large systems of people behave. How exactly? I didn’t know yet but I persisted and decided to read more. This was also a time that I was traveling a lot and read Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. I loved the way they described of approaching problems from an economics perspective that was yet unknown to me as an “engineer” doing engineer-ey things. From that point on, exploring these ideas was always at the back of my mind.
But as the dreaded placements approached (which in IIT lingo is the be all end-all of your 21 year long penance) I was increasingly nervous and just hoped to get into one of these companies that everyone held in high regard so I could be one of those celebrated success stories (yeah this sounds dumb but that’s the way things work around here). So I dragged my behind to every company Pre-Placement Talk that I could. These are incredibly uncharitable events that are only meant to advertise the firms and create FOMO, and skipping these came with penalties from the placement committee (again, go figure). I ended up sitting for a couple of “Day 1” companies and decided that if I didn’t make it there I’d just take my time to figure out what I wanted to do. Turns out I didn’t make it to those and now I was sitting in my room without an offer and slightly stressed to say the frikkin’ least as all my friends and colleagues were celebrating getting there job placements. I ended up graduating soon afterwards (this is around mid-2017) without any plans on what to do next.
I headed back home and just kept reading up on the kind of research I was interested in, within Economics. I ended up cold-emailing professors I wanted to work with all over the world. One of the professors that I had emailed wrote back after a couple of months asking me if I would be interested in working with her on a project remotely. I jumped at that opportunity and we collaborated for a bit. She was then presenting one of her works at the RBI, so she asked me if I’d like to tag along. This led to me discovering about a Research Assistantship there, which I applied for and received.
While working there, the professor I had worked with suggested that I apply for a M.Phil at the University of New South Wales where she worked. This was a funded two-year research program that I applied to and got into. By March 2018, I was gearing up to join the program at UNSW Sydney, which is an absolutely great institution that I owe a life debt to for how supportive they have been. I ended up learning a ton about research methods in Economics during my work as a RA at RBI and my years at UNSW. I was determined to pursue research further and I did the PhD-app thing. Admittedly, I was not great at it at all and I should refrain from giving any advice regarding the process. I was extremely lucky to be accepted to UT Austin, an institution that I had always held in high regard following the words of many great colleagues that had been here.
All in all, while I think I have cut some parts short the experience of getting into IITB and making my way across disciplines to where I stand now you’d think I have a lot of clarity about things, but I absolutely do not. I have just been a person who takes several next steps without really having much of a destination in mind and that has worked thus far. I say this with a lot of privilege, of having the support of several giants along the way and having the brand name that IIT grants you. I remember our Dean of Academic Affairs at IITB once deriding the term “placements” as in his opinion that equated human beings to pawns on a chessboard as one of the things that offered me some clarity. I have learned my lessons chasing prestige.
The root word of prestige itself means trickery (which completely blows my mind whenever someone says they are “prestigious” yada-yada). While being an IIT-ian has given me several advantages, I have found people outside the “IIT” prestige circle that I found inspiring. Most notably recently I was listening to Viral Shah, a co-creator of Julia describing his journey that left me with sheer respect. There are constantly people around me and you who do not care about the societal definitions of what it means to be “successful” and “high-achiever” and “prestigious”. At the end of the day, people who create value for others create a lot of value for themselves. In retrospect, I am where I am because of a series of extremely lucky accidents and the only thing I am excited about is what I am gonna be doing tomorrow.
