Moved to Gold Coast
I spent most of 2023 trying to make my education legible to people who could not read it.
It began with a resignation. I had left my faculty post at Srishti that September, over how the work there was assessed and paid, and I left without a next step lined up. The freedom and the free-fall were the same feeling. Dr. Venkat caught me mid-air and pointed at a PhD, and for a few weeks the path looked obvious: gather the transcripts, find a supervisor, begin.
Then I went looking for records I had not thought about in nearly a decade. Prising my ADP transcripts from 2013 to 2015 out of the system was its own introduction to the bureaucracy of academia. When I finally submitted them, the answer came back that the degree did not count. Srishti's ADP was a master's with a thesis in everything except the one thing admissions could read: a GPA. The rejection was not a surprise, and it still stung, because it was not about my work. It was about a number my education never produced.
While that door was closing, a louder thing was happening at home. The November before, our dog Simba had been in a serious accident, and his recovery became the family's centre of gravity. I put the academic plans on hold. There is a strange mercy in being stopped by something you love more than your ambition.
What I did next was not nobler, only more honest about the system I was standing in. If the front door wanted a GPA I did not have, I would go in through a side one. I applied for a master's in Australia, the kind that produces the legible number, and treated it as a long corridor back toward the PhD. The education loans fell through. My family made up the difference, which is its own kind of debt, the sort that never shows on a statement.
By the end of the year I was at Griffith on the Gold Coast, working through coursework and starting to draft a proposal for research I actually wanted to do. I had not won the argument with the institution. I had just learned to speak its language well enough to be let in.