How Abhijeet Bayani Discovered His True Calling

My career story didn’t initiate in the school, it started pretty late, in fact, after my UG years! 

From the beginning, I was taught to think that ‘get a quick degree and a quick job, no matter whether you like it’. I was so ‘brain-washed’ to take microbiology, supposedly it had a great scope in the ‘industries’. Many told me to finish BSc with good grades and said “…the jobs are there for you!” And you know what, I did start with microbiology in RYK college, Nashik. As an undergraduate student, I was even told by most of the people that “Yeah! You know what, all jobs are rather the same! No matter which one you go for”. 

According to me, UG years were supposed to be exploratory years. But I was, to an extent, discouraged to defy the flow. I eventually found myself uncomfortable in the controlled and confined environment of laboratories and I left microbiology. I was fascinated by the species diversity found around, especially spiders from the time I had watched the first movie on Spiderman in 2002-03. I wrote numerous notes on their identification, behavior, life history and natural history in my free time throughout my UG years. I needed more time to go on field, so I went for Zoology by the second year of BSc and continued that until my MSc.

During my undergraduate years, I was equally interested in spider, bird and amphibian taxonomy; animal behavior; ecology; wildlife conservation; molecular crystallography; and neurobiology. As there was no way I could learn all that at the same time, I decided to take up summer and winter projects in each of these fields. I worked with leading scientists in those respective fields and got a glimpse of all. In the end I understood that I liked research in natural history and conservation biology, but I liked only the idea of research in the rest of the fields. By the end of MSc, I was determined to go for conservation biology.

I got a chance to work on Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project immediately after my MSc in Zoology. Later, I worked with Prof. Milind Watve for my PhD and at the same time got many insights from leading conservation biologists particularly from R. Sukumar, Mewa Singh, and Charudutta Mishra.

I must say that my PhD wasn’t just a subject and skill training. There was a time that my research was called ‘Not Science At All’ and I was suggested to change it entirely! I rather took motivation from this and improved up on my science and the related skills. My PhD offered me ample time and good training to think on asking good questions and putting good hypotheses for research, the philosophy of doing good science, communicating science effectively, and thoughtful analysis of the data or even the situations.