Before the PhD Began: My Two-Year Road from NET to PDKV Akola
Before the PhD Began: My Two-Year Road from NET to PDKV Akola 🌱
I finished my Master's and cleared NET in 2022. Alongside NET, I also cleared GATE and the DBT-BET (Biotechnology Eligibility Test), qualifying under Category II. On paper, that should have been the moment my PhD story started. In reality, it was only the moment the waiting began. 🕰️
What Clearing NET, GATE, and DBT-BET Actually Means 🎓
For anyone outside biotech circles reading this, here's the short version of what these three exams are and why clearing them mattered:
NET (National Eligibility Test) — conducted by CSIR-UGC (for science subjects) or ICAR (for agricultural sciences), it's the baseline qualification that makes you eligible for a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) and for lecturer/assistant professor positions in India.
GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) — despite the "Engineering" in the name, GATE also covers Life Sciences and Biotechnology, and a GATE score can equally make you eligible for a JRF-equivalent fellowship or admission into M.Tech/PhD programs, especially at IITs and CSIR labs.
DBT-BET (Biotechnology Eligibility Test) — run by the Department of Biotechnology through the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, this is specific to biotech. It produces two merit lists: Category I (the top-ranked candidates) get a guaranteed DBT-JRF fellowship tenable at any Indian university where they register for a PhD. Category II — where I qualified — doesn't come with an automatic fellowship. Instead, it makes you eligible to be selected into a DBT-sponsored project, and if a Principal Investigator does select you, you're paid a fellowship equivalent to the standard NET/GATE JRF rate, as per DST guidelines.
On the fellowship amount itself: the Government of India revised research fellowship rates in 2023 (effective from January 1, 2023) across CSIR, UGC, DBT, and DST schemes uniformly. As things stand, a Junior Research Fellow earns ₹37,000 per month for the first two years, which steps up to ₹42,000 per month as a Senior Research Fellow (SRF) for the remaining tenure, once you clear the SRF upgrade assessment. On top of that, there's usually HRA (house rent allowance, where applicable) and an annual contingency grant — around ₹20,000–30,000 per year depending on the scheme — meant for books, travel, and consumables. Since my DBT-BET result was Category II rather than Category I, my own PhD fellowship at PDKV has come through the university/ICAR route rather than a direct DBT project fellowship — worth being upfront about, since Category II is often misunderstood as a consolation prize when it's really a different (and conditional) route into a project-based fellowship.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." a line often attributed to W.B. Yeats, and one I didn't fully understand until I was standing in front of a classroom myself.
I did not have a strong enough plan for what came next, and that delay cost me time I did not realize I was losing. In the gap, I joined MGM College of Agricultural Biotechnology — my own undergraduate college — as an Assistant Professor. It turned out to be one of the most formative phases of my career, even though it was never meant to be the plan.
Learning to Teach While Barely Keeping Up 📚
Teaching there taught me the learning process itself in a way no exam ever had. But the workload was relentless. I was handling three courses every semester, and then COVID hit and compressed our semesters down to just three to three-and-a-half months. That meant squeezing a full syllabus, along with all the practicals, into a fraction of the usual time.
I ran every practical session myself. I built every lecture PPT myself. On top of the coursework, I was giving a Master's-level seminar almost daily, and I had also taken on additional charge for NSS. It was a lot of moving pieces for one person, and looking back, that overload is part of why my documentation and planning for PhD admissions slipped — I simply didn't have the bandwidth to manage both at once.
What I actually learned about being a good teacher, in hindsight:
📖 Know the UGC framework cold — not to recite it, but because it tells you what your students are actually entitled to, and where you have room to innovate within it.
🎤 Keep training yourself, not just your students — I attended 3 National-level training programs during this stretch, and each one reshaped how I ran my own classroom.
🔬 Say yes to mentoring more than feels comfortable — I ended up guiding 18 student theses across these years, and every single one taught me something I couldn't have learned from teaching alone.
🏆 Push your best students toward the bigger stage — 4 of my students went on to represent at national-level camps and competitions.
🗓️ Build the culture, not just the curriculum — between coursework, seminars, and student activities, I helped organize 78 events in total during this period, and NSS work under my charge earned institutional recognition.
✍️ Publish with your students, not just for yourself — 9 research papers came out of this period, co-authored with undergraduate and Master's students. As Franklin is often quoted: "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn."
If I'm honest, my PhD admission wasn't even my biggest priority during this stretch. My duty to my students and their curiosity mattered more to me in the moment — and that focus, oddly, is what carried me through the mess that came next.
A Year of Doors Closing 🚪
When I finally tried to apply for a 2023 PhD admission, it felt like every door was either locked or half-open.
Here's the honest list of where I tried — universities and institutes where I applied or interviewed, but the PhD door didn't open:
RMIT University, Australia
NIT Rourkela, India
IISER Bhopal, India
IPK Gatersleben, Germany
KU Leuven, Belgium
University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic
Agharkar Research Institute, Pune, India
BAMU University, India
IIT Guwahati, India
IIT Indore, India
BARC, Mumbai, India
I couldn't manage the mails and logistics in time for a couple of universities. At a certain point, I genuinely let go of hope that a PhD seat would come together that cycle.
One Last Form 📝
Then the ICAR exam — delayed that year, pushed all the way to late July, with results only in October–November — gave me one more chance. I filled the form more out of habit than hope, telling myself it was my last attempt. I scored 264 out of 400, with an All India Rank of 54. Good, but the field was competitive enough that "good" didn't feel like a guarantee of anything.
While the MGM HR office approved my special study leave for the PhD program in December 2023, I was still juggling manuscripts, seminars, and student mentoring right up until the transition — the two worlds overlapped for weeks
Akola 🌾
The counseling finally came in November, and PDKV sent through my provisional admission letter that same month. It placed me at the Biotechnology Centre in Akola — a sprawling campus in the heart of Vidarbha, built for drought-prone agriculture, the kind of place that felt, after everything, like the dream land I'd been circling toward without knowing it.
That's where the next chapter — the one about the crisis that actually rebuilt me — begins. 🌿
That's story is here 👇
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