I’ve seen several pivots in my career that were both circumstantial and serendipitous. However, when I reflect upon it, I realize a key influencer and coach in my journey didn’t have this designated role. It is only in hindsight I realize how my approach was shaped by the four plus years I spent as a graduate student sharing an office with a faculty which was the unusual result of my advisor having an electron paramagnetic resonance spectrometer in his large office at the corner of the top floor of the tallest structure on campus.

I had landed in the US as a graduate student despite refusing to apply for graduate school as the graduate record exams I took were done on an insistence by a classmate from India who wanted to prepare together, but wanted me to have skin in the game so to speak. I had designed my career path in academia in India which had worked out quite well such that I could be a faculty in the university and pursue a PhD while working. That was until I was struck off the rolls by a government inspector who held the institution I was hired at, for a violation of not meeting quota restrictions to appoint faculty from underprivileged sectors of society. The irony of it is that I was a member but not legally. When I revealed this to the Principal (Provost equivalent) he pleaded that I go to court and get an affidavit attesting to it. I thought about it and decided against it. I viewed myself as a scientist, and the rest were incidental and circumstantial. I called up my friend who was a graduate student and thus had landed a year later, in the US.

As soon as I landed I was eager to complete the process of signing up who to work for. I had researched the faculty interests and on the top most was a faculty, I had the most interest yet the least confidence of gaining acceptance with.

Dr. Douglas Clayton McCain had a PhD from UC Berkeley and had a record of consistent publications that were pretty much just himself and collaborators from Purdue.

I knew he never had anyone sign up for a PhD under his guidance. I found out very soon as he explained the implication of being his student. From day one he said you have to have the mindset that you are an independent researcher. The requirement to graduate with a PhD would be largely his when he can say with confidence, what I can demonstrate through a story of my own which would be original research with just one publication at the least, where a majority if not all the published work is what I carry out. It didn’t have to be the topmost but a generally accepted journal with reviewers.

Cultural blinkers I had on, made me venerate the fact that he had a UC Berkeley PhD, to a point that I didn’t feel daunted despite the fear that gripped me. When the acceptance had sunk in, the fear returned. I had a conversation with him about it. I pointed out that he had obtained his degree from UC Berkeley but I was his student at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. So I asked him how he accepted me and if he could relax the requirement. He began by asking if all the work records I had submitted were authentic. I stated it certainly was and it was evident from it I was not any rank holder at any point. In India, unless you had a distinguished stellar record you could submit but you’d rarely hear back from any ranked institution or affiliated entity.

What he stated then was a key aspect of branding that I now realize. He said “all universities” in the USA were “UC Berkeley” as they followed the same structure and pattern. If it was not so, then the problem lay with the perceiver. If I didn’t think I was at UC Berkeley, in the US, I couldn’t succeed. He vouched for it from his experience that opportunities existed everywhere.

This aspect of branding was also a factor in competition. Several years later, after a day long session of interviews, presentation and meetings, for a position at the University of Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, as I was being dropped off at the airport on the way back, by the faculty whose lab I had applied to, casually asked, how do you feel about taking on and beating MIT, Harvard and UCBerkeley in HIV research. My immediate response was I’d love to do that.