Prompt - Tell us about your academic journey, your inspirations, hardships and how you have overcome them. 2500 characters.
I have about 3600 characters (640 words), so need to get down to at max 500. Please help!
"They said this money serves God's purpose, but now they act like it belongs to them. It's nothing but a cult!" said my grandfather with contempt, after resigning from his various posts with the Swadhyay Parivar.
When just a few weeks into the tenth grade I learnt that Nanaji had disgruntledly left the organization that had been a part of his life for over ten years, I was more than taken aback. You see, he was one of the most religious people I had known, who set a lot of stock my rituals as a path to inner peace. While I have always loved working with computers and till then was quite set on choosing computer programming as my profession in life, this incident really got me interested in social psychology - trying to understand what drives people's behaviors and why we behave the way we do.
With the internet as an untiring mentor, I soon encountered a number of brilliant blogs - like 'The Situationist'- that introduced me to many fascinating phenomena, like the effects of cognitive biases on decision making. Multiple re-runs of 'Lie to Me' had even convinced me that I had become a walking lie-detector with an uncanny ability to decode the slightest tics! This was also when a friend introduced me to 'Project Euler', an online collection of mathematical problems that are required to be solved by coding in a language of one's choice. This pushed me to try my hand at different programming languages and understand varied algorithms - a practice that has continued to this day. Many of my days were spent either preparing for the Board examinations or trying to get the run-time of my code down from ten minutes to ten seconds.
That quiet routine was in for a rude shock, however, when soon after the final examinations my parents insisted that I follow in my brother's footsteps and prepare for the IIT-JEE examination. Knowing that that was a very demanding endeavor and would leave little time to pursue other interests, I begged and threatened, but all my please fell on deaf ears. I was whisked off to a coaching school in Kota, Rajasthan. No sooner than two months into the course I began noticing disturbing transformations in my disposition - slight loss of appetite turned into significant weight loss, difficulty in concentrating turned into constant irritability and feelings of pessimism gave way to suicidal thoughts. On my mother's insistence I consulted professional help and to my utter disbelief was diagnosed with clinical depression. To someone who considered himself the most cheerful person on the planet, to say that that was alarming news would be a gross understatement.
With many months of counselling and infinite familial support, I managed to overcome this impediment and move on with life. However, instead of hiding this incident from friends, my brother encouraged me to wear it proudly as a battle scar, as a reminder of what I have been through and overcome. This was also a defining period in my life - the mere fascination with psychology was galvanized into serious consideration of pursuing it as a career path. My ambition is to work at the critical juncture of psychology and computation - to understand group dynamics and their significance in policy formation, to discover the hidden influence cultural factors on consumer habits, to decipher how the crowd forms decisions and what compels an individual to blindly follow the herd. If I can use my research to understand how to stop a twelve year old think from taking his own life, what makes people believe so firmly in an ideology that they do not think twice before taking their own lives, and if my work can bring even one person hope in life, I honestly believe my purpose would have been served.
