I am writing this at the end of a Monday that felt three days long. My legs are tired. My brain is somewhere between switched off and barely running on background processes. This is probably not the most composed post I will write, but it is the most honest one for today.
The Day Before
It started on Sunday, actually.
I was in Dharmapuri for a school friend's wedding. The kind of full-day event where you eat well, catch up with people you have not seen in years, and slowly remember why weddings are both enjoyable and tiring at the same time.
After the wedding, I got ready in the afternoon and took a bus back to Coimbatore. Reached the city around 9 PM. There was not much time to settle because Monday morning was my first day at college for my PhD admission. I set an alarm, tried not to think too much, and went to sleep.
Monday Morning: The Administrative Part
I reached college by 9 AM.
I knew roughly what to expect — paperwork, formalities, that kind of thing. What I did not fully anticipate was how much moving around and waiting is actually involved in any of this.
I submitted my Transfer Certificate. Completed attendance-related formalities. Stood in front of a camera to register my face for the biometric attendance system — because that is apparently how they track whether PhD scholars are actually showing up. Then I finished the remaining initial administrative work.
These are the kinds of things that take real effort to get through but are difficult to explain in any interesting way when someone later asks how the first day went. "I submitted forms and looked at a camera" does not make for a great story.
After wrapping up those things, I called my PhD guide to check in.
He was on medical leave.
Right. So that was that.
There was nothing more I could do at the college at that point. The academic side of the day was essentially paused before it had started. I made the practical decision: I cancelled the leave I had taken from my software job and went back to the office.
Which means, for a few hours in the middle of my first day as a PhD scholar, I was just a regular software developer again. Sitting at my desk, writing code, as if the morning had not happened at all.
The Meeting That Started an Hour Late
There was a PhD scholars' meeting scheduled at college from 2 PM to 3 PM. So I requested an hour's permission from work and made my way back to college.
I reached at around 1:50 PM. Found the room. Sat down. Waited.
The meeting started at 2:50 PM.
I am not particularly annoyed about it. These things happen everywhere, and it was not a malicious delay — just the natural pace of institutional schedules. But there is something mildly funny about sitting in a room for an hour waiting for a one-hour meeting to begin. You look at your phone. You look around the room. You try to look like a person who is patiently waiting rather than someone calculating how many hours they have been awake.
The meeting itself was fine. It was informational, an orientation of sorts for the new PhD batch. It ended around 3:15 PM. After that I met the HOD, finished the remaining discussion and formalities, and by around 4 PM I left the college.
The Other Scholars
I should say something about meeting the new batch, because this was also technically my first time being around the other PhD scholars.
Everyone was meeting everyone else for the first time. Introductions were happening, people were finding out who was from where, what they were working on, which guide they had. There was the kind of low-level socialising that always happens when a new group is formed and is trying to figure out its shape.
I mostly listened and watched.
That is just how I am when I am in a new group, especially a large one. I do not find it easy to walk up to a stranger and start a conversation. I need some time before I feel comfortable enough to be more than politely present. I was probably one of the quieter people in the room that day — not because anything was wrong, just because I am not the type to immediately introduce myself to everyone and start building rapport in hour one.
I imagine this will change over time, as it usually does. But on day one, I was mostly an observer.
The Food Situation
Here is the detail I keep coming back to.
I had barely eaten anything the entire day. Not because I consciously decided not to, just because the day kept moving and there was never a clean moment to stop and eat.
At around 4:30 PM — after leaving college for the second time, after all the back and forth — I finally stopped somewhere and had chicken rice. That was my first proper meal of the day. It was very good, almost unfairly so, mostly because I was at a point where I genuinely needed food and anything would have tasted excellent. Chicken rice at 4:30 PM after a day like that hits differently.
The Travel
Let me just write out what the day's travel actually looked like:
Home → College → Office → College → Office → Home
I took five Rapido rides in a single day just to manage the schedule. At some point during one of the afternoon rides, sitting behind a biker on a Coimbatore road, I thought about how absurd this looked if you described it to someone as your first day as a PhD scholar.
I had also planned to meet my girlfriend that evening. By the time I got back to the office after the college meeting, that was no longer realistic. I was completely exhausted and had to cancel. I did not have much energy left even for a proper conversation, which is its own kind of tiredness.
Where Things Stand
Later in the evening, I messaged my guide to update him on the meeting and what came out of it. We had a brief discussion. It looks like proper classes will begin after September, so the academic part has a starting point at least, even if it is a few weeks away.
I am not expecting to dive into research on week one. That is not how any of this works. But it is good to have the administrative part done and know roughly when things will start.
A Quiet Ending to a Strange Day
This was technically my first day as a PhD scholar.
It involved a Transfer Certificate, a biometric camera, finding out my guide was on leave, returning to my day job mid-morning, waiting an hour for a delayed meeting, meeting the HOD, five Rapido rides across Coimbatore, chicken rice at 4:30 PM as the clear highlight of the afternoon, and arriving home tired enough that forming sentences felt like effort.
I had started an important new chapter — something I had been working toward for a while — and the actual first day was not cinematic at all. No sense of arrival, no defining moment, no feeling of things clicking into place. Just a lot of ordinary logistics in a row.
But maybe that is a more honest beginning than a dramatic one. Not everything worth doing starts with a clear, memorable moment. Sometimes it starts with submitting a TC, registering your face for attendance, and eating a late lunch alone because the day ran away from you.
I do not know yet what this PhD is going to look like over the next few years. I have no real sense of the scale of what I have signed up for.
But today happened. The paperwork is done. My face is in the biometric system.
That is probably enough for the first page.
Written on 25 August 2026, after getting home and sitting quietly for a while before deciding to write this down while it was still accurate.