My Life in USA Explained in Cartoons

I moved to the USA to join Vanderbilt University as a PhD student.

Life was hard in grad school. There was no money. I missed my family. I worked mostly alone on hard problems that no one really cared about. There were constant rejections from conferences and journals. Self induced delusion of a bright future was the only thing that kept me going. My apartment mate and I came up with the phrase Hum Hi Stud Hain (We are studs) to keep us going.

The world has become much smaller today than it was fifteen years back when I went to the US. I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of things that I had not seen in India. Clean air. Fast internet. Giant onions. Walmart. Interstates. However, there were also a few unpleasant adjustments to make.

It was very hard to stay disciplined and maintain regular hours in grad school. There was a period where my sleeping time kept getting progressively delayed and I ended up completing a full 24 hour circle, back to sleeping at regular human hours.

While graduate school does not offer much, the biggest thing that it offered was limited access to amazing faculty, unlimited access to an even more amazing peer group and the promise of a bright future. For me, the best part of being in graduate school was the daily doze of mindless philosophy with my friends.

After spending 4 years in grad school, I had enough. I was too lonely and wanted to get married. So, like any other Indian guy from my generation, I decided to get a job.

It was very scary to enter the corporate world. I was afraid that Scott Adams was perhaps not kidding. To my pleasant surprise, Google proved to be a great place to work. In fact, it was so good, that I spent the first six months believing that it was too good for me. After that, I got used to this feeling and life settled in a Monday to Friday routine.

I still remember the only time my parents visited me in the US. I was proud to show them how their kid has made a life for himself away from home. They had a different agenda on their mind.

Soon after that, my grad school dream of getting married was fulfilled, thanks to www.agarwal2agarwal.org and the gullible girl who agreed to spend her life with me.

Working in real world was scary. I worked on fighting payment fraud on AdWords. Any mistake could lead to fraud going live, harming our users and costing Google money. A lot was at stake. The first time I carried a pager, I did not sleep at night for the entire week.

Production bugs used to give me nightmares. Until I fixed any P0 bugs assigned to me, I could not sleep.

Over time, I grew in confidence and decided it was time to become a hamster.

Soon, I started feeling like the red queen, cruising between bugs, on-call duties, weekends and promotions. One of the great things about working at Google was the opportunity to work with a diverse set of colleagues. Everyone had a different perspective. Everyone had different motivations. It was an amazing learning experience and has been helping me ever since my life and career.

While my US experience was amazing and I could have easily spent my life there, after living in the US for about eight years, my wife and I decided to move back to India to be close to our parents.

Well folks, that sums up my story.