I belong
“I was often told I wasn’t fit to do a PhD. Years later, when I finally held that degree, I discovered that earning it was easier than learning to stop believing those words.
As a child, I was academically bright, usually among the best in my class. Then, in Standard IX, I began struggling with physics and mathematics. I had loved those subjects once, and I couldn’t understand why the concepts that seemed to come so easily to others had suddenly become inaccessible to me. I would come home and cry, frightened by the feeling of falling behind and not knowing how to catch up.
Chemistry, biology and literature became my refuge. I could lose myself in an organic chemistry problem or in reading about the human body. Despite coming from a family with a strong medical background, I didn’t want to pursue medicine. I wanted to study basic science, to understand how and why things worked. Some people assumed I was choosing it because I hadn’t got into MBBS.
Getting into Presidency University quietened some of those questions. I loved reading, learning, and following one question until it opened into another. That curiosity took me to IIT Bombay for my Master’s, somewhere I had never quite dared to picture myself. Being there changed how I saw my own possibilities. After being rejected twice, I received the Indian Academy of Sciences Summer Research Fellowship and went to CDFD, Hyderabad, for an internship.
I still remember generating my first confocal image of a fly brain. I wanted to hold on to that moment forever. Looking back, I realise how much the people there shaped that happiness. They taught me the basics, encouraged my questions, and made me feel that I could learn. In their company, science felt exciting and welcoming. I returned to Bombay eager to begin my dissertation, carrying a confidence I had rarely felt before.
My proposal presentation went well. My supervisor appreciated it, and I remember thinking that perhaps I really could do this. Over the next six months, that confidence slowly came apart. I struggled to translate my proposal into meaningful work. I made mistakes, and with very little guidance, I recognised some of them much later than I should have. Eventually, I needed a two-month extension to rectify my thesis. While my classmates finished and left campus, I stayed behind. I worked hard and completed it, but the experience left me questioning whether I had mistaken my love of science for an ability to do research.
I didn’t want to begin a PhD without answering that question. An internship in a computational biology laboratory at NUS seemed like an opportunity to find out. Instead, I struggled with coding and felt increasingly alone. Singapore was unfamiliar, I had few people to turn to, and I was miserable in work I couldn’t find my footing in. When I returned to India, I decided to join an experimental laboratory and work with things I understood better. But even there, I made errors, struggled to sustain my interest, and watched my confidence diminish further. By then, other people’s doubts had become part of my own inner voice. Still, somewhere underneath them, I wanted to do a PhD. When the opportunity to go to Germany came, I took it wholeheartedly.
The first two years were wonderful. I loved the city, learned to live independently, and travelled to places I had once known only through pictures. Then I began falling ill. There were bouts of fever and menstrual pain that became progressively harder to bear. I took more leave than I wanted to. I didn’t know how to make people understand what was happening. Menstrual cramps were supposed to be normal. I wondered whether I was simply less capable of enduring them than everyone else. So I tried to manage, explain less, and carry on. During Covid, loneliness became more difficult. Being independent had once made me proud; being ill and alone made me realise how vulnerable I was.
In September 2021, I spent a night lying awake, writhing in pain. My abdomen had swollen, and I could feel that something was terribly wrong. It was late, and I stayed there through the night, waiting for morning. When morning finally came, I sent my landlady one word: ‘Ambulance.’ She came running to my room, saw the condition I was in, and called for help. Only a week earlier, I had gone to the emergency department because of the pain. I had been turned away, told it wasn’t an emergency because I wasn’t pregnant. Now I was returning on a stretcher.
The scan showed blood in my abdomen. I was told that there were cysts in my uterus and that they had ruptured; I needed surgery immediately. When I regained consciousness after the operation, the doctor remarked: ‘Frau Das, you could have died.’ But the surgery wasn’t the end of it. Afterwards, I could barely get out of bed. My oxygen saturation had fallen to 68%. The doctors explained that prolonged shallow breathing because of the pain had contributed to lung collapse. I also had pneumonia. I needed oxygen and spent three days in intensive care. Nobody was allowed to visit.
When I was discharged, my colleagues and my landlord’s family helped me. They brought food, checked on me, and offered whatever care they could. I remember those gestures with enormous tenderness. When your family is far away and your body has frightened you so deeply, someone making sure you have eaten can mean more than they know.
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Eventually, I returned to work and began writing my thesis. Seven months after the emergency, in April 2022, I defended my PhD. I wish I could say that the degree washed away everything that had come before it. But I was exhausted, and Germany had become inseparable from memories I didn’t know how to live with. I had experienced so much beauty there, but I no longer felt at home.
A few months later, I interviewed for a job at Aurigene. I had never really pictured myself outside academia, and I knew very little about what this new life might ask of me. Yet I remember knowing that the interview had gone well. When the offer came, I felt an enormous sense of relief. On 25 December 2022, I left Germany. At immigration, the officer pointed out that my residence permit would expire in a month. I told him I knew, and that I didn’t plan to return.
I started at Aurigene on 2 January 2023. I still think of it as the second-best decision of my life. The first was marrying my husband, whose patience and faith in me had carried me through years when I could find so little of either for myself. He believed I had something special to offer long before I could believe it. I don’t think I can ever fully explain what it means to be loved like that when you feel so disappointed in yourself. But even with his support, I arrived at my new job afraid. I had the degree now, but I still worried that I wouldn’t fit in, that I would struggle again, that people would eventually discover I wasn’t capable enough.
What happened instead was quiet and gradual. People listened when I spoke. They gave me opportunities and trusted me with responsibility. I had room to think, to ask questions, and to follow an idea far enough to find out whether it had merit. I began doing work that made me eager to learn again. I didn’t take any of it lightly. After years of wondering whether there was a place for me in science, being given that trust felt precious. I wanted to honour it with everything I had.
I learned techniques I had never used before, from working with patient samples to protein and gene-expression assays. I began understanding cancer drug discovery: how a molecule is studied, how evidence is built, and how difficult it is to turn a promising laboratory result into something that helps a patient. The more I learned, the more I wanted to contribute. Developing a biomarker plan became one of the most meaningful parts of that journey. I was trying to understand why a drug might work in one cancer and not another, and what could help us identify the patients more likely to benefit.
A year into my job, I received the Individual Excellence Award at the annual ceremony of the company. I remember standing there, holding it, hearing people clap. To them, it may have been a moment of recognition for my work. To me, it reached back through years of feeling inadequate. Something softened in me that day. I allowed myself to feel proud.
Aurigene gave me hope through experiences like these: an idea being heard, a new method learned, a difficult question entrusted to me, work that made a contribution. Over time, those experiences gave me reasons to trust myself again. They also gave meaning to something I had carried for years, the wish to do something for my country and its people.
The work demanded rigour, patience, and the willingness to accept results that disappointed us. I learned that strong preclinical findings do not always translate into clinical benefit, and that a compelling idea still has to withstand evidence. But I wanted to take responsibility for my part of that work. I wanted to help us ask better questions, understand responses more carefully, and give promising science its best chance of becoming useful.
There are still challenges: experiments that fail, disagreements, difficult days, and moments when the old doubts return. Yet I could feel myself changing. I am willing to try things I once would have been too afraid to attempt. I can recognise a mistake without always treating it as a verdict on who I was.
I often say I didn’t consciously choose drug discovery; it chose me. This year, I received the Individual Excellence Award again. I hadn’t expected it, and I felt deeply grateful. This time, alongside the happiness, there was also a sense of peace.
I wish I could sit beside the younger version of myself, the girl crying over subjects she couldn’t understand, the student left behind on campus, the researcher alone in a foreign country and tell her that I understand why she is tired. I wouldn’t tell her that every painful thing had to happen, or that she would someday be grateful for all of it. Some of it hurt far too much. I would tell her that there are people she hasn’t met yet who will see what she can do. That she will learn to be curious without being so afraid. That one day, an idea she has will help move the work forward, and she will go home carrying the quiet happiness of having been useful.
For a long time, I thought I had to become someone extraordinary to deserve a place in science. Today, I want to keep learning, do work that matters, and contribute to the country I chose to come home to. After everything, I have found a place where I can do that and I have learned to believe that I belong here.”
-Payel Das, PhD in Cell And Developmental Biology, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany
