Aditi Nadkarni: How to impress your graduate advisor

The Story Collider

Story Collider, Inc.

Arts, Science, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Performing Arts

4.4 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2013

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a new, super competitive, graduate student Aditi Nadkarni thinks she has the perfect way to impress her advisor and labmates ... until one night it spirals a tiny bit out of control. Aditi Nadkarni is a New York-based cancer researcher and a freelance science and creative writer; her occupations are a miscellany of creative pursuits. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	A science story, huh?
0:04.0	Is NYU a scientist?
0:06.0	I felt it.
0:07.0	I felt.
0:08.0	I was so...
0:09.0	And I just thought, well...
0:10.0	It was that golden moment.
0:13.0	Because science was on my side.
0:15.0	... Hey everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to the Story Collider,
0:28.6	where we bring you true stories of how science has affected people's lives.
0:32.5	This week's story is from Aditi Nudkarni.
0:35.2	The story was recorded in July, July 2013 at Union Hall in Brooklyn.
0:39.3	The theme of the night was,
0:41.3	close to death.
0:47.3	Before I tell you the incident that I'm going to describe today,
0:52.3	let me tell you a little about myself so it would
0:54.8	help to know why this sort of shit happens to me.
0:59.6	So if you haven't noticed, I'm Indian, that's part of the explanation, but also, you know,
1:09.4	being an Indian, you have 1.5 billion people who are very willing to replace you if you don't prove your worth and so that makes all of us very competitive sometimes in situations where you don't need to be competitive. Like for example I'll very rarely go to the gym but when I do I'm always like on the elliptical looking over my shoulder at the level that the other person is on and then I'll go one level up.
1:34.3	It helps if they're old and unfit, so that's it.
1:38.3	So this used to be much worse about 10 years ago when I was a graduate student and I was fresh
1:45.1	off the boat from India.
	...

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