I am sitting with my coffee, writing the final chapters of my thesis, and my hands are not entirely steady. In a few months I will submit five years of my life as a bound document, and instead of feeling triumphant, I feel anxious. The anxiety that comes from knowing something is ending and you have no idea what comes after. My mind keeps sliding backwards, into everything it took to get here. It makes me feel worse, if I'm honest. But underneath the ache, there is also something like hope and a quiet certainty that I made something good out of all of it. I decided I wanted to do this in my second year of undergrad. I wanted to spend my days on education and research. I joined my PhD program right after the worst of COVID had passed. The first few months felt like wandering through an open field. I was exploring topics, chasing ideas, letting curiosity lead. I didn't know yet how much that field would later feel like a battlefield.
Then I actually started
writing the chapters and the papers, and
academia showed me its other face. I learned quickly that everyone here is
competing, and almost no one is here to help you. I went to my seniors, the
ones who seemed to have it figured out. I asked them everything: how to find
the right journal, how to sharpen an idea, how to survive the process. They had
plenty of time to complain about the department. They never had time to sit
with me. Some wouldn't even discuss their own published work when I asked. I
still don't fully understand why. Maybe I was just a junior scholar who needed
a little handholding and didn't get it. Maybe that's not a small thing to
admit, but it's true, and it hurt. I was lucky in a way; I got a good supervisor.
Someone who stayed with me at every step, who actually listened, who kept
nudging me back onto the right path when I wandered off it. But one person,
however generous, cannot replace an entire missing community. We need people
beyond the formal structure; people to think out loud with, to complain to and
to celebrate. I didn't have that, and its absence became its own kind of
loneliness.
Then came the rejections.
Between 2021 and 2024, I collected 34 desk rejections from Scopus-indexed
international journals. Thirty-four. Almost one a month, and every single one
before the paper even reached a reviewer, which meant not one editor thought my
work was worth a second look. I revised. I studied the journals' own published
articles to match their style and scope, and still, somehow, my paper was
always "beyond scope." Although similar works were being published, I
just faced rejections. I kept presenting at conferences, kept getting selected
for mentorship programs, kept being told the ideas had promise. But promise
doesn't count in a system built on publish or perish, and I was
perishing quietly, one rejection email at a time. Probably, I was/am not a good
scholar. Eventually, I stopped sending
anything out at all. My confidence didn't just dip; it collapsed. I slipped
into a depression I couldn't out-think or out-work my way out of. I was
diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. I started medication, then sleeping
pills, because sleep itself had become a struggle. I felt worthless in a way
that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't lived inside it, like the work
you've poured yourself into has quietly decided you don't matter. I was still
reading, still researching, still visiting the field and talking to people, and
still, on paper, producing nothing. Zero. I gave up on people. I gave up on my self. But I survived that stretch because
of the people around me. My friends who celebrated the smallest wins like they
were enormous, and a family that never once made me feel like I owed them a
publication to be worth loving.
By mid-2025, something
shifted. I started sending my work to Indian journals instead, and for the
first time in years, I got good reviews back. I got published. I still have a
folder of drafts waiting. The papers I believe in that I haven't found the
right home for yet or still need improvement. Maybe they'll get published one
day. Maybe they won't. I've made a strange peace with that uncertainty. I'm
still going to keep sending them out. I don't think I'm unusual in any of this.
I think many of my peers and juniors are quietly carrying the same weight: the
uncertainty, the empty publication list, the family pressure, all of it.
Somehow, everyone keeps surviving. But the isolation is real, and I think it's
costing more of us than we admit out loud. We don't have people in our own
field who feel like they're rooting for us to grow. The jealousy runs strange
and high, and I still can't explain why. The competition feels like it's aimed
at your throat, not your potential. People blame the professors, say they don't
support us, don't care, but from where I sit, the professors are often the only
ones who genuinely want to see us succeed. It's the toxic competition among
peers, the friendships with smiles on the surface and knives just beneath, that
need to end. I don't know if they will. But if they don't, I worry that the
hunger young people feel for research, the thing I felt in my second year of undergrad,
will quietly die with them. That would be a real loss for academia, not just
for the people it burns out along the way. Today I have a handful of published
papers, a few book chapters, some book reviews, and a stack of manuscripts
still sitting in peer review, waiting their turn. What I have, more than any of
that, is patience. A patience I did not have five years ago and had to earn the
hard way. My supervisor has always told me that every journey is different,
that all you can really do is stay true to your work and trust that it will be
enough. I'm starting to believe that.
Soon I'll have my PhD.
But I hope I never forget why I started: not for the papers, not for the
rejections that outnumbered the acceptances, not even for the letters after my
name. I wanted this so I could teach. That part hasn't changed, and it never will.
