Things have been rather confusing in the past week. If I was asked a week ago, I would say that I have more or less decided on Princeton as my choice of university. However, I then started thinking specifically about professors with whom I would want to do my project with. I was looking for professors who are doing theoretical work on the Early Universe, and who are relatively young (and thus upwardly mobile). I thus identified A. in Harvard and K. in Princeton whom both fit these criteria. In fact I was truly impressed with the number of citations they both had considering their young age, and their work was very exciting.

Now, I've discovered that K. is leaving Princeton and is thus unavailable to me, but A. said that he might be taking students in the next few years. So the plot rather thickens as far as my decision is concerned. Princeton has an excellent cosmology programme, but K. seemed to be the only person doing theoretical work on the Early Universe.

Another thing I've discovered is from the eventual careers of graduates in Harvard and Princeton. Both departments have a list of the fates of students who did their PhDs there, and while in general it's not very easy to get academic positions in the top universities even for Harvard/Princeton PhDs, Princeton seems to produce more top academics than Harvard.

So the basic message is that in most aspects Princeton is the better choice, apart from the very crucial fact that I have already identified a Harvard prof I would very much like to work with. This really complicates the decision-making, so I've decided (pun intended) the best way to make the choice would be to visit the respective campuses, so I'm going to make a 5-day whistle-stop tour of Princeton and Harvard in late March....

The past couple of weeks have been a strange, almost surreal, experience. As mentioned ago, I had the most pleasant shock of my life when I received a PhD offer from Princeton, and followed the next day by Chicago. Since, then, the offers have come in, to the extent that everytime I see some of my Indian friends in halls who ask me, 'Any more news??', I do indeed have more news. A week after Princeton and Chicago, it was Harvard with an offer, and in the past couple of days they have really started to tumble in... Cornell 2 days ago, and today Stanford.

I have never felt so confident about myself in my entire life. Before university, my life has always been marked by under-achievement. I was always considered a bright kid, but in school I've had better things to do than to do my homework and pay attention to classes. Reading books, playing computer games and watching TV were more interesting and fun, to the extent that I scarcely remember doing any homework or studying for exams during primary school. Yet, I've always had the competitive streak, to be better than others, and without the inclination to actually work for it.

I was bright enough to do pretty well, but never to the level I (unfairly) expected. Nevertheless, as I grew, I gradually began to work harder as my goal in life became more defined during adolescence. Still, I could never find the 'killer' touch to absolutely be the best at what I was doing. There were always people better than me.

Although this desire for glory died down as I began to build up my self-esteem, it always seemed that I could never completely achieve goals that I set for myself. For example, I was satisfied with my results in university, but part of me was irritated that someone else always managed to beat me, which took the wind out of my sails somewhat.

My hard work in university was intent on preparing myself with the knowledge needed to carry out a scientific career, while at the same time ensuring that when the time came to apply for graduate school, my record would be good enough to ensure that I get admitted into a good university. Obviously, just one offer from a good university would be enough for me to get a good boost into an academic career, but I mentally set myself an insane goal: to apply for the top universities in the world, and get offers from them. I pushed myself in this pursuit, and pushed myself to the edge of depression.

It was my New Year's resolution to detach my ego from my ambitions in life, and to work hard in science not out of self-glorification, but out of curiosity and love of knowledge. And somehow, after I stopped trying to boost my ego, I finally managed to do something that was absolutely unexpected.