I was enrolled in La Martiniere for Boys School, Kolkata in 1992 and continued here until I passed 12th grade in 2006. From a very early age, I was very passionate about math and science, and this has continued to be a source of life-long interest. I passed 10th grade (ICSE) with an aggregate of 95.2% in 2004 and the 12th grade (ISC) in 2006 with an aggregate of 88.5%. I was part of the school chess team having represented the school in many tournaments and fests throughout Kolkata. 

I appeared for the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination in 2006, which is a competitive examination held every year to select the candidates for the various engineering colleges across the state of West Bengal. I ranked 1,587 out of over a 100,000 candidates and enrolled myself into the Civil Engineering Department at Jadavpur University, the premier engineering college in Kolkata. I spent the next five years pursuing a BE. Very early on in my engineering degree, I had figured out that this was not for me. But finding an alternative in an inflexible and unkind education system (as is prevalent in India) was nigh impossible. 

After graduating from Jadavpur University in June 2011, I decided not to pursue a career in engineering. I spent the next few months tutoring kids in the grades 9-12 in the areas of physics and mathematics, and it is here that I realized that where my true interests lay - I wanted to do physics and math! But not just from a teaching perspective, I wanted to learn more about fundamental science and contribute to modern research. Here was formulated the grand plan to shift streams. It was clear that no university in India would accept me given that my background was not in STEM, and I condsidered an education abroad. 

To prove that I had what it took, I needed to take a few exams (like the GRE and the subject GRE) as well as do a project on my topic of interest. I started working on a reading project with Prof. Banasri Basu in early 2012 at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, in the field of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement. Simultaneously, I spent my time studying the other areas of physics needed to supplement a lack of undergraduate experience, like classical mechanics, electromagentism, and thermodynamics. I scored reasonably well on the GRE (322/340) and the subject GRE (860/1000) and applied to a few colleges in the US, being on a very tight budget. I was accepeted in the fully-funded MS program at the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois and Chicago in early 2013. Finally, I had a chance to live my dream!

I landed on US soil on the 16th of August, 2013, at 11.00 am in Chiacgo's international airport, O'Hare. The next few months were spent acclamatising to the new culture, enviroment, and education structure. I would go on long walks in and around Taylor Street, the area where I lived, exploring and enjoying everything on view. I took a few undergraduate physics courses in my first year so as to makeup for my lack of a physics background. In the meantime, I was teaching undergraduate students basic physics. I made new friends, and I found myself being able to fit in well. 

Then came Chicago's winter - if you haven't experienced it, it's quite something. It's below freezing for 8 months of the year, with a low temperature of -30 degrees Celcius and extreme winds. I wouldn't recommend it. 

In my second year at UIC, I took a bunch of graduate courses and dabbled in research - I started working with Prof. Ursula Perez-Salas and Prof. Luis Nasser on the topic of cholesterol transport in lipid membranes. My task was to model data from experiments using the Diffusion Equation. We made a fair amount of progress, athough not enough for a publication. 

Near the end of 2014, I applied to a few PhD programs across the US and was accepted by the University of California, Davis, in February 2015! At this point in time, my interest was to pursue string theory.

I graduated from UIC in May 2015, and had the next four months off, before school started at UC Davis. I came back to Kolkata and visited ISI to meet Prof. Basu, with whom I had worked on a project a few years earlier. She suggested that I start work on a research project concerning topological insulators, a novel material that had been recently discovered. While the area of physics was condensed matter theory, which was not what I wanted to pursue, the project turned out to be rather interesting. I worked with her and Dr. Debashree Chowdhury for the next few months, which led to my first publication. Prof. Basu and I have collaborated ever since, on several projects, ones even outside the domain of physics.