Lucy is a great place to build connections, learn and share, and to enhance one’s social and intellectual experience

I am currently working on solving fundamental problems in machine learning as well as applying machine learning to solving real world problems, like handwriting recognition, flight delay propagation and supply chain design and optimisation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have already entered into our day to day lives where they are having a positive impact. I am glad that I can continue to make contributions.

In my childhood, my science teacher pointed out the pictures of scientists in my science book saying that these are the people who live for society and even forget to eat-sleep while solving problems. That fascinated me and I decided to become a scientist and contribute to society. It wasn’t that easy for me to get where I am now and I struggled a lot. 

After my masters in Computer Science, I could not qualify for a fellowship so I had to join industry. For almost 2.5 years and after applying seven times, finally I passed my fellowship exam. But that was not the end of my hardships. I couldn’t get into our (Indian) top institutions (where I dreamt of doing research) mainly due to my non-engineering background. But after a difficult journey, I reached the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

I once attended a Formal Hall at Lucy Cavendish College with one of my friends and really liked the environment. I think it’s a great place to build connections, learn and share, and to enhance one’s social and intellectual experience at Cambridge University. So I decided I wanted to be part of this great community. Although I joined recently, I realised that the community is like a family - if anybody is facing any kind of problem other members try to help by all means. That’s really amazing.

A PhD is a start of an academic journey where a candidate learns mainly about doing research on a very narrow topic. But a postdoc is a refinement of that learning which gives a candidate the opportunity to expand his/her research into related areas. It is the intermediate step in the transition from a student to a professor. It also gives a chance to learn about funding and fellowship applications to support our research, and to also expand our academic network. I believe a postdoc is essential for the academic journey, at least for getting a lecturer/professor position in top universities. It helps to create a strong profile in terms of number of publications, and diversity and experience in different research areas.

I did my PhD in kind of an isolated way on a very specific fundamental topic of optimisation in ML. I wanted to learn more, work in teams to solve problems, and I wanted to apply my research to real world problems. I felt like I needed more exposure before actually getting a lectureship position so that I could start a great research unit later. So I chose to go for a postdoc. I hope it will give me more of a competitive edge when applying for a lectureship position, which could be otherwise difficult.