Let's Decode The Cosmos Together 💜

I Didn't Get the University I Wanted. I Found the Life I Needed. The journey toward cosmology begins with ordinary days of studying, questioning, and learning. How academic setbacks, mental-health recovery, and a changed definition of success reshaped my journey toward physics and cosmology. This is the final chapter of my origin-story series. If you're discovering this story for the first time, I recommend starting with Blog 1 , Blog 2 , and Blog 3 before reading this chapter. The journey will make more sense in that order. Personal experience disclaimer: This article describes my own experience of mental health, treatment, recovery, and academic setbacks. It is not medical advice, and my experience should not be treated as evidence that a particular treatment or practice will work for someone else. Everyone's experience is different. When Blog 3 ended, I had been diagnosed and was beginning to recover. I want to pick up exactly where that story left off, because recove...

If you're a physics student interested in cosmology or astrophysics, installing Python is only the beginning. A proper research environment should be clean, organized, and easy to maintain as your projects grow more advanced — and getting this right early will save you hours of frustration later. When I started preparing my Ubuntu laptop for scientific computing, I quickly realized that simply installing Python wasn't enough. I needed tools for numerical computation, symbolic mathematics, data analysis, visualization, and interactive notebooks — all while keeping project dependencies isolated. T his guide documents the exact setup I used to build my Python research environment for cosmology and astrophysics work. If you're just starting out, you can follow along step by step. Why Ubuntu for Scientific Computing? Ubuntu is one of the most widely used operating systems in research and scientific computing. It offers a stable environment, powerful terminal tools, e...

  When the Ground Gave Way: My Mental Health Crisis in Class 12 and the Long Road to Diagnosis A note before you read: this post talks openly about panic attacks, hospitalization, psychiatric misdiagnosis, and medication. If this is a hard topic for you right now, please feel free to skip this one, or come back to it when you're ready. Disclaimer: This article is a personal account of my experiences. It is not medical advice. Every mental health condition is different, and treatment decisions—including medication—should always be made in consultation with a qualified mental health professional. In my last post, I told you about the momentum I'd finally built in early Class 12 — coaching that was working, grades that were climbing, a plan that finally made sense after a year of teaching myself from scratch. I said the next chapter would be harder. This is that chapter. The Ground Shifting Again Partway through Class 12, my school reversed its earlier promise to support competit...

Dreaming of the Cosmos, Fighting the System: How I Navigated the "Dummy School" Struggle How I chose self-directed exam prep over regular school, faced my family's fear of an unconventional path, and learned that understanding people is its own kind of science. Quick context for readers outside India: After 10th grade, Indian students aiming for top science institutes often face a choice between attending regular school full-time, or enrolling in what's informally called a "dummy school" — where you're technically registered, but don't attend daily classes, freeing up time to prepare intensively for entrance exams. The exams in question — like JEE Advanced — are brutally competitive, roughly comparable to trying to get into MIT or Caltech, except the applicant pool is in the millions, not thousands. This post is about what happened when I chose that harder, less conventional path — and what it cost me at home. 1           The Crossroads...

The Catalyst at 14 : The 8th-Grade Moment That Sparked My Journey to Cosmology How a rural classroom, a science teacher, and a five-minute video of the International Space Station set an aspiring cosmologist on her path. Some nights, I still stand outside and look straight up, asking the same question that has followed me for almost a decade: how did this universe begin, and how will it end? It's a strange question for a teenager to carry. It's an even stranger one to carry growing up in a small rural school, where "space" mostly existed in textbook diagrams — not in real conversation. But before I knew a single equation, before I understood what "research" even meant, before I had ever even heard the word cosmology — someone handed me a telescope I didn't know I needed. Not a real one. Just a phone screen, a science teacher, and one ordinary class in 8th grade. This is the story of how my journey toward cosmology actually began — and the first ...