Author Spotlight: Shivani Malik

Having Faith in Oneself Amid the Hustle and Bustle of Academic Life – Shivani Malik

Sometimes, when I reflect on my life as a scientist, I see it superimposed on a single, frantic image: a hamster on a wheel. I don’t recall the exact day this image took over my perception of academic life, but I know it settled in during those relentless, twenty-hour lab stretches. I was that hamster—running tirelessly, sometimes with joy, sometimes with soul-crushing frustration, always moving yet often feeling as though I was going nowhere. But at some point, I realized that the secret to surviving the wheel isn’t speed; it’s faith.

On days when an experiment worked, I felt like a happy hamster, energized and triumphant. On days when experiments failed, I felt like a sad, moody, or even angry hamster, questioning the purpose of all that effort. I had been in academia long enough to know that the “Eureka!” moment, the kind of breakthrough that launches ordinary researchers into the hall of fame, was a myth. And yet, despite the repetitive cycles of hope and disappointment, I kept on the wheel.

What keeps the hamster going? In nature, it is instinctual behavior, a drive to move and explore. For me, it was scientific curiosity—the pull to uncover the secrets of how a cell maintains the fidelity of its DNA. That curiosity was one explanation for my persistence, but it was not enough on its own. What I needed, more than anything, was faith—a deep, unshakable belief that I was moving toward something meaningful, even if I couldn’t yet see the destination.

That faith came from many angles, woven into the fabric of my upbringing and personal history. My grandmother, who had only a fourth-grade education, raised ten children. She recounted her life stories when we sat under the mango tree of my childhood house in North India during my summer holidays. “I had to feed everyone! I learnt how to use every single part of the vegetables we had… I would use the peel as well the flesh of bitter gourd,” she would say triumphantly, giving me a toothless grin. “I stitched a patch worked quilt from torn clothes. It was an extra layer to protect the children from the chill of winter in Delhi. I was very resourceful,” she said with a shine of pride in her cataract-laden eyes. “But I wish,” she would say releasing a little sigh, “I had a chance to be in the school for a few more years. I would have loved to be better at Ganit, math. I could run my household even better.”

 My mother, who married and had children in her early twenties, often shared that she missed the opportunity to be a young, free college girl, an opportunity to develop her young mind. When I was in grade four, I brought home an assignment: write an essay on “your ambition.” Seated under the canopy of Bougainville, the lined notebook open on the plastic table between us, my mother thought out loud. She said she would have liked to do a job or run a business if she had a choice. Moments later, she told me that education was going to set me on the path of possibilities.

My grandmother’s and mother’s vision for possibilities and their unshakeable belief in the power of education laid the foundation for my own journey, an opportunity I knew I could not squander.

To keep my wheel of academic research spinning, I also relied on my faith in myself—a quiet conviction that I was unique, worthy, and capable of breaking stereotypes imposed on women of my time. I believed I could achieve what those who came before me had only prepared the ground for. This faith was essential. It sustained me through long nights in the lab, through failed experiments and moments of self-doubt. It reminded me that the choice to be on the wheel was mine, and that my path—messy, uncertain, and demanding as it was—was valid.

In the end, the faith that kept me running was a concoction of inherited values, personal conviction, and the joy of discovery. Even when the work felt soul-numbingly repetitive, when the lab politics were as toxic as a chemical spill and the meagre stipend felt like a joke, I trusted in my journey. I understood that being on the wheel didn’t mean stagnation; it meant persistence, resilience, and the conscious choice to keep going, one small revolution at a time. And that conscious choice—that definition of self-faith made all the difference.

Faith in oneself amid the hustle and bustle of academic life is not about naively expecting success at every turn. It is about trusting our own abilities to overcome hurdles and finding meaning in the effort itself. For me, pulling an all-nighter that resulted in a failed experiment was not about insanity but lessons learned that enabled me to keep me moving, pushing ahead. And that quiet, fierce satisfaction makes even the busiest, most demanding days deeply, uniquely meaningful.