“Wow, you’re doing a PhD? That’s amazing.”
I hear this a lot. And I won’t lie — it feels good. I worked hard to get here, and I’m proud of it. But every time someone says it, there’s a small gap between what they’re congratulating and what actually got me here. That gap is where this post lives.
The Long Way Around
I should have finished this years ago. I completed my postgraduate degree in Economics at a well-regarded institution, followed by an MPhil. By any normal timeline, a PhD should have come next.
It didn’t. Family responsibilities took over, and I stepped back. Not because I stopped wanting it — because life asked for something else first, and I gave it.
For years, that chapter just… stayed closed.
What Grief Made Room For
Then came COVID. Within a gap of just five months, I lost both my parents. If you’ve been through something like this, you know there’s no roadmap for what comes after — just a kind of vacuum where you used to have a role: daughter, caretaker, the one who worries.
I didn’t fill that vacuum with a plan. I filled it, slowly, with an old, unfinished ambition. I started preparing for the UGC-NET exam — one of the toughest qualifying exams in India for pursuing a PhD.
I sat for it alongside my university’s own PhD entrance exam. I cleared both. On the UGC-NET, I scored in the 99.84th percentile — a score that, on paper, qualifies for the JRF, the country’s most substantial PhD scholarship.
The Rule That Didn’t See Me
Here’s where the story turns. Because I was over 35, I wasn’t eligible to actually receive the JRF — despite earning the score for it.
Instead, I get the standard university scholarship: a fraction of the amount — and even that is technically meant to be paid monthly, but the paperwork involved is so extensive that, in practice, researchers like me end up receiving it in lump sums every three to five months.
I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it says something bigger than my own situation. The exam doesn’t ask why you’re 35 and only now sitting for it. It doesn’t know about the years you spent caring for family, or the parents you buried, or the fact that your “late start” was never about ambition — it was about survival, and about what women, especially, are so often expected to postpone. The exam only measures what you know now. But the scholarship that should follow that score measures something else entirely: whether you fit a timeline that was never built with women like me in mind.
I earned the top mark. The system still said, essentially, you’re too late.
That’s not a complaint about one exam. It’s a small, sharp example of something much bigger — how financial independence, for many women, isn’t something delayed by choice. It’s something that gets quietly rationed by rules that were never written with our actual lives in mind.
The Part Nobody Congratulates
Three-plus years into this PhD now, heading into my second review, with a year left to finish — I carry it in ways that don’t show up in the “wow, impressive” reaction.
Knee problems. Shoulder pain. The particular mental strain that comes from constantly being evaluated: presentations, publications, papers that need to go out whether your body is cooperating or not.
None of that is visible when someone hears “PhD” and pictures a title, a graduation photo, a line on a CV. What they don’t see is what it costs to get there — especially when you’re getting there later, carrying grief, a body that’s asking for rest, and a bank balance that reflects none of the merit you’ve proven on paper.
Why I’m Writing This Anyway
I’m not writing this for sympathy. I’m writing it because I don’t think enough is said about what it actually looks like to keep going — not the highlight-reel version, but the real one, with the pain and the setbacks included.
If you’re a woman who paused something for family, who’s starting “late,” who’s doing the math on scholarships and rules that don’t account for what your life actually looked like — I want you to know: the late start isn’t a failure. It’s often just the truest evidence that you were carrying something heavier than a timeline could measure.
I don’t know if I’ll get another chance at something like this. So I’m finishing it — knee pain, shoulder pain, and all — because putting it into words, finally, felt like the least I owed myself.
This is the first post in what I hope will be an ongoing series — reflections from the PhD journey, and the life that runs alongside it. If any part of this resonated, I’d love to hear from you.