[Written for the IITBNF Blog]

My life’s taken some pretty interesting turns. I attribute the most intriguing one to IITBNF (which was CEN when I started working there). What started as an undergraduate summer project to measure capacitances at the femto farad level morphed into one where I was actually fabricating tiny channels at the micrometer scale to act as fluid conduits. One thing led to another and I’m now working on a masters thesis involving cancerous cells and chemical gradients!

Over the course of 3 years at IITBNF I learnt a lot of skills – tangible and intangible. From a hyperopic perspective, they were lasting lessons for life. That rushing through the fabrication process will culminate in a disaster during characterization. Also, I learnt the hard way that lady luck and triplicates are not great friends. The intense planning and level of exacting control over each step of the fabrication process was both frustrating and satisfying at the same time.

It’s fun to look back and play a game of ‘what if?’. What if IIT Bombay was not chosen to host the CEN facility? What if my supervisor did not simply trust an undergrad with actual fabrication(we do have this unsavory reputation)? What if the instruments I needed were not available? On asking myself these questions in retrospect, it dawns on me how lucky I have been to have been exposed to one of the most well equipped fabrication labs (I’ve seen a grand total of 2).

I could conclude with the cliched reference to Robert Frost’s “The road not taken” but I shall refrain myself from doing poetic injustice to this wonderful set of experiences.