4 minutes of readingUpdated: February 10, 2026 21:37 IST
Shubha Tole, distinguished professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, who took over this year as president of the International Organization for Brain Research, said that the way an institution treats its youngest members (the students) is a good measure of its quality.
“If institutions implement progressive measures to better support students in PhD programmes, it will create a significant change not only in the quality of their research, but also in how the scientists of tomorrow perceive the future of Indian science,” Professor Tole said.
Professor Tole, speaking to The indian expresshighlighted some of the key initiatives taken during her tenure as Dean of Graduate Studies, TIFR, and on the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (February 11) encouraged women “not to give up on their dreams, even if circumstances seem difficult right now.”
According to Professor Tole, PhD students generally have a manual of rules and requirements to guide them, but they have to discover the rest through conversations with final-year students or professors: what to expect from PhD training, what to do when things don’t go well, how to plan for their future after their PhD. “During my tenure as Dean of Graduate Studies, TIFR, we implemented several new initiatives as a result of examining our own graduate programs from new perspectives. Our country’s education system would benefit from a nationwide discussion on these issues to consciously promote an empowered next generation of scientific leaders,” said awardee Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar.
He cited the example of learning cultural values and how students aspire to join doctoral programs but are not sure what their training is for afterwards, apart from becoming academics. “This is perhaps the biggest misconception that research training imparts a multitude of skills that are useful in a variety of different professions. We asked our students who had moved on to non-academic careers to send us 10-minute videos explaining how they started thinking about exploring career options, how they got their first job, what they love about their current job, what the challenges are, whether they wish they had continued in academia and then posted it on our career guidance website,” Professor Tole recalls.
‘They used their research training at TIFR to develop careers they enjoy’
Interestingly, it showed a range of productive and exciting career options in areas such as finance, share trading, patent law, scientific writing, content creation, data science, startups and industry, Professor Tole said. He gave examples, including Saumya Gupta, a student who completed her PhD in biology working on yeast genetics, then went to Harvard Medical School for her postdoc, and now works at Bain and Company, an international consulting firm.
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“What Saumya said was that the academy gave her everything she wanted to learn, the ability to think about the problem, analyze and solve it and eventually package a not-so-simple journey into a beautiful story in terms of writing and presentation. For Yukti Arora, who works in the Academic Communications office at Ashoka University, the problem-solving skills at TIFR, particularly learning to ask questions at the right point, were invaluable in meeting the challenges of her job,” Professor Tole said while quoting a small sample of the stories of his former students. “They used their research training at TIFR to develop careers they enjoy,” Tole added.
‘Not even trying is basically giving yourself a rejection slip’
On the occasion of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Professor Tole, former chairperson of the Women in Science panel at the Indian Academy of Sciences, also reminded women that they should not give up on their dreams even when the situation feels difficult. “Not even trying is basically giving yourself a rejection slip! No matter what works later, we will only regret not having tried to follow the path we are most passionate about,” Professor Tole said.
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