Accepting the Indiana Biomedical Gateway doctoral program offer to hopping onto a 28-hour Indianapolis-bound plane and reaching my non-living companion at Gardens of Canal Court for the next five years marked the start of my IUPUI journey.
August 24 as we started classes with these amazing intellectual cohort mates around me, the feeling of camaraderie led to us becoming family by choice. Each day this family grew with the graduate division staff and the faculty at IUPUI warmly welcoming us in as if we have known each other for years, already making this unfamiliar land seem more familiar and closer to heart. The supportive, loving, friendly environment and extremely helpful and nice people around helped that naive, inexperienced 22-year-old grow into a scientist and achieve her doctorate degree in virology in May 2019.
With the ultimate goal of training as a scientist and achieving my doctoral degree, I wanted to engage with the community and with the IUPUI family for personal and professional development. This chapter started with engagement with the on-campus Toastmasters Club: Communicators at IUPUI (formerly named as Scientific Toastmasters at the IU School of Medicine) in 2015. Over the years, Toastmasters taught me to be a good, influential orator and an effective leader.
One of my memorable moments as a speaker was when my club speech on “Loving our Parents” had tears welled up in the audience’s eyes, and I was able to touch their hearts and make them feel emotions through the use of my words. My terms serving as the vice president of public relations (2016-17) for the Communicators at IUPUI Toastmasters club, spreading its name across the IUPUI campus, and as the Area 35 director (2017-18) for District 11 Toastmasters honed my leadership, management, and negotiation skills, and significantly boosted my professional development leading to Area 35 (comprised of five clubs in and around Indianapolis) receiving Distinguished Status at Toastmasters International. My last year with the club as president (2018-19) has led to it achieving the President’s Distinguished Status (the highest honor bestowed over a club by Toastmasters International) in June 2019.
As the graduate student president for the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 2017-2018, I served as the student representative at the admissions committee for our program, planned regular student gatherings to increase and keep the camaraderie alive amongst the graduate students in midst of their research, and served as a unified voice and an advocate for the students whenever needed. These leadership positions taught me how to be an efficient leader, instilled in me the value of teamwork, and improved my decision-making skills and its applicability in the real world. As a student representative in the admissions committee of the graduate school, I gained perspective and greater understanding of the holistic approach taken by the committee when considering an application.
My father always reminded me of the five-point rule that he believes can bring success to anyone: determination, honesty, sincerity, hard work, and perseverance. And trust me, it helps at every moment of life.
Bidisha Mitra, Class of 2019
Due to my interest in literary writing, I’ve written quite a few articles on various topics in the past. Hence, when our NetworkIN committee decided to maintain a blog on the IU School of Medicine website, I found the perfect opportunity for me to keep honing my literary writing skills. This blog mainly focuses on topics relating to networking. Personally, it helped me share my ideas, refine my writing, build a professional network, and earn more exposure. My first blog for this platform helped us launch and market the “NetworkIN” group in order to gain more publicity and exposure for our professional events.
One of my priceless and most-valued relationships developed at IUPUI is the mentor-mentee relationship with my mentor, Dr. Haitao Guo. The most humbling and down-to-earth person I have known, an incredible scientist, and an amazing individual, Dr, Guo’s guidance has shaped me into the scientist I am today with multiple publications on my CV and my thesis work on Hepatitis B Virus p22 protein being published in the Journal of Virology.
Graduate school has given me the opportunity to attend multiple international conferences—the International HBV Meeting, the International Liver Congress in South Korea, Paris, Italy etc.—to showcase my work as an oral presenter and get recognized by scientists all around the world, to network and facilitate a discussion on advancement of research on liver diseases with distinguished scientists, and to take a step toward understanding the liver pathologies better. The high that I felt on winning the Cagiantas Scholarship, the Merilyn Hester Scholarship, multiple travel grants, and being named in the Premiere 10 of Elite 50 were some of the biggest highlights of my time at IUPUI.
My father always reminded me of the five-point rule that he believes can bring success to anyone: determination, honesty, sincerity, hard work, and perseverance. And trust me, it helps at every moment of life. I have felt the remorse and sadness of getting negative results from an experiment that I had high hopes for, as well as the extreme happiness on getting a positive result after having failed at every attempt to get one. I have felt the loneliness on failing on an experiment or getting bad grades and looking for someone to comfort me. But I have also been fortunate to feel the exhilaration and excitement of proposing a hypothesis and looking forward to starting a study.
For me, the life of a graduate student can be summed up as exhilarating, exciting, and autonomous, spiced with moments of disappointment, apprehension, and success towards a better and brighter future. It’s like a pizza, and one must enjoy every slice of it and all the various toppings on it to the fullest before it gets gobbled up!
Story courtesy of:
Bidisha Mitra
Class of 2019
