A summer at the University of South Carolina- Just Wait for It!

After the end of a busy 2015, it was a start to a new year with ambitious desires and lots of expectations. It was 1st of January when I had my first interview for the internship selection at one of the foreign universities called State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo in the United States. It was going to be a tough interview as there were several of my batchmates who had better profile suited for that internship, were also going to sit in the interview. Just to give a brief idea about how they had a better profile than me, I spent my previous summers doing things not related to academics. I went for Explorer Fellowship in the summer of 2016 and did some institute building work in the summer of 2015. So basically, I haven’t done any projects or some related work apart from the routine courses, which most of the other people sitting for the interview had done. The interviews were over and I was somehow convinced based on the interview that it would be difficult for me to get a foreign internship given my CGPA and profile.

As the semester progressed, the internship opportunities would be floated as and when they arrived. I knew that if I had to go on a foreign internship, I had to go with the contacts of professors whom I know otherwise the chances are thin. So, I contacted Prof. Vimal Mishra, whom I knew since the start of my undergraduate career. I expressed my desire of going for an internship abroad. You might be aware that not every professor is approachable and not everyone would be ready to recommend you to their colleagues, but Prof. Mishra was not one of them. He was always ready to provide opportunities for genuine students. And I would not boast about it, but I would fall into the category of “genuine” student which is why Prof. Mishra was willing to help me.

Meanwhile, there was one internship opportunity at EPFL, Switzerland floated in the institute. Three students including me sat for the interview and two students were selected of which I was not one of them. It was almost March ending and I couldn’t see more of opportunities coming. Now the only option left was Prof. Mishra. Every morning I would be seen waiting for him outside his office, to remind him that he needs to talk to his colleagues for me. This went on for almost one week. Next morning, I woke up and as usual I took my cell phone to check for notifications. To my surprise, there was an email from Prof. Mishra saying “Congrats Prakrut, you are going for an internship!”. There were six other emails in the same thread where Prof. Mishra sent my CV to his colleague Prof. Venkat Lakshmi at University of South Carolina and Prof. Lakshmi confirmed that he wanted to have me as an intern for summer of 2017.

Suddenly, I was all happy and my friends and family flooded my social media accounts with wishes. All the necessary procedures for the Institute, the VISA process and the documentation from the University of South Carolina(UofSC) were completed just on time. Unlike my other batchmates, who were going in groups of at least 2-3 people, I was all alone. Twenty-nine hours of flight journey to the States, two months of stay and again twenty-nine hours of return flight back to India, started to daunt me as I had to stay alone and manage everything. I was fortunate enough to get a room in an apartment close to the department with Indian roommates. UofSC is located in the city of Columbia which is the capital of South Carolina. Columbia is a second-tier city with quite decent transport and life gets harder for people who don’t own a car – which was the case with me.

Two days after reaching Columbia, I was still suffering from the jet lag and luckily Prof. Lakshmi gave me a week’s time to get acquainted with the place and complete the official processes with International Student office at UofSC. My first meeting with Prof. Lakshmi was after roughly two weeks from the time I reached there. Venkat Lakshmi, a man with a smiling face all the time – Each person in the building would know that Venkat (as he preferred to be called) is here when he was around. In the very first meeting, he told me that the first thing you should do while your stay here is – Enjoy! Go to the park and work. Don’t just sit in this closed shitty rooms whole day. So that was the first impression of the American way of doing work – at least that’s what I concluded from it. While Prof. Lakshmi was away, I worked with his research group i.e. Ph.D. students and Postdoc students. Most of the things that I learned was by discussing with those people, each of whom would have their own way of working and had different research interests.

‘IITian’ – This is the thing which made me feel proud out there. Those Ph.D. and postdoc students might be good at research which I will eventually be after the experience, but being an IITian, you can be good at what you want to; which is not the case with the rest of the bunch. All this boasting of IITian is because the students were not good at coding or the data analysis part and as usual IITian, I knew some basics on which I worked upon. Those students were fascinated by this and they asked me to teach them Python – one of the computer programming languages used for data analysis. I happily agreed to that. So now, my normal routine would look somewhat like this – 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM:- My own internship work; 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM:- Teaching Python to them.

One month into the internship and I was just able to finalize the topic on which I would be working on. As Prof. Lakshmi would say – “Have a clear plan on what to do and rest would be an easy task.” I worked on the topic of ‘Evolution of groundwater resources in response to pumping, land-use change and rainfall in India’. It was basically studying the patterns of changes in groundwater storage levels affected by changes in different parameters using satellite data.

Overall, I am proud of what I did in those two months of the summers of 2017. I went on to continue the same work here back at IIT Gandhinagar and was able to present this work at the conference – AGU Fall Meeting which was held in New Orleans during December 2017. Thanks to the Student Travel Grant that I was awarded for presenting my work at the Fall Meeting. And of course, being a teacher of one Ph.D. and two Postdoc students was the cherry on top of it. In the end, it was all possible because of Prof. Vimal Mishra and his confidence in me. I would like to thank him from the bottom of my heart for providing me with this wonderful opportunity.