Why I came back from a funded PhD in the US

In 2014 November, during campus placement process starting in December I was contemplating if I should sit for placements or not as I was already preparing for PhD admissions across US universities for 6 months now. I was done with GRE, TOEFL, recommendation letters, SOPs, etc. Even I had submitted my applications to few universities.

Finally, I sat for placements after my professor put forth very convincing points why I should not let go any opportunities, and even got an offer from Accenture. Two month letter, I got admission offers from two Universities as well - University of Washington, Seattle and Iowa State University.

Now, I had two very different options in front of me. One was to join Accenture through campus placement. The other was to move to the US for a funded PhD in Economics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

I chose the second one.

At that time, it felt like the right decision. I was interested in economics, statistics, development, and understanding how societies grow. A funded PhD in the US looked like a serious academic path. It was also a big jump for me personally: I had never gone abroad before, and I had never even sat in a flight before.

But even before the PhD started, I had to deal with the financial side of the decision. GRE, TOEFL, university applications, sending scores, travel and tickets together added up to a real financial burden, and I was already calculating how I would repay it. The journey started with excitement, but also with pressure.

Landing with one instruction and no phone

The flight to the US was the first flight of my life. I landed first at Narita International Airport in Japan, I had the connecting flight to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport from there.

I had no working phone when I landed. One of my IIT Kanpur seniors had helped me a lot during the admission process: we had spoken often, but I had never met him in person. He told me he would track my flight and meet me near the third pillar on the left side of the airport exit, where a lot of buses would be standing.

That was the only clue I had. No phone, no backup plan, just one instruction. It worked exactly as planned, and I met him there for the first time.

Seattle, and a new way of learning

Seattle was one of the most beautiful cities I had seen: lakes all around, colorful leaves, tall buildings downtown, a good mix of nature and modernisation.

Our PhD batch had 23 people from around 15 countries, and I was the only Indian in the cohort, my first real interaction with non-Indians in a close academic and social setting. The first two years of a PhD are almost like doing an MS: coursework in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and statistics, TA work for stipend, grading answer sheets for extra money, and reading around to find a research direction.

One course stayed with me permanently. Prof. Yu-chin, who taught macroeconomics, explained topics through their historical evolution: the idea that if you understand how a field developed, you understand why it looks the way it does today. It wasn’t only about what a theory says, but why it came into existence, what problem people were solving, what had failed before it. That habit of mind has stuck with me since; I still find it hard to study anything without first understanding its historical context. It reminded me of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, which I’d read in a course at IIT Kanpur and which remains one of my favourite books for the same reason.

The contradiction I started feeling

By the second quarter, I had settled on developmental economics: I wanted to understand development, poverty, governance, and how policy actually affects people.

Around the same time, I started working as a research assistant on a project involving Indian data, under a Chinese professor. That is where the contradiction started. I could not properly relate to the data I was working with. District boundaries, how many villages sit inside a district, how government works at different levels, the relationship between civil and administrative bodies. All of it was jargon to me at that point.

I was studying India, but I had not understood India from the ground. If I wanted to work in developmental economics, how could I do justice to Indian data without understanding Indian reality closely? I could run the analysis, learn the methods, study the papers. But something was missing, and the missing part was context.

The question of belonging

Alongside the academic confusion, there was a personal feeling I couldn’t shake: I was lacking a sense of belonging. Cultural seclusion, feeling of loneliness was taking over.

I had very good housemates - 5 people from India, four of us were from IITs doing our PhD in different fields; discussing at home, sometimes cooking food together at home.

Nothing was going badly: the university was good, Seattle was beautiful, I was doing fine academically, the professors were supportive. But I could not see myself continuing there for five or six years and building a life outside India. I also suspected that if I completed the PhD, coming back would become harder: opportunities in economics in India were limited.

It wasn’t only a career question. It was a question of where I wanted to belong, and what I actually wanted to understand.

When I am re-reading here, the logic looks incomplete enough to make a decision like leaving a PhD programme. I should probably write a bigger write-up around how I was feeling at that particular point of time, as I am sure that decision was not completely emotional, I has given at least 3 months of time to that thought.

Deciding to come back

After introspecting for one more quarter, I decided to return to India. I had spent around six months in the US.

It wasn’t an easy decision: on paper, leaving a funded PhD doesn’t look sensible, and I had worked hard to get there. But I felt that staying only because the opportunity looked prestigious would be dishonest with myself. I wasn’t running from difficulty; I was walking away because the path no longer felt aligned with what I wanted to understand and where I wanted to build my life.

The decision got harder before it got easier: the Head of the Statistics Department at UW, one of the highest-ranked departments, offered to move me into a PhD in Statistics instead, after being impressed by my work in a course under him. It was a genuinely good offer. But by then my decision was already clear, and I came back.

What I understood later

At the time, I didn’t have a polished explanation for the decision. I only knew I wanted to return to India and explore.

After coming back, I looked at opportunities across analytics firms, NGOs, and other places, and eventually joined IPAC, the Indian Political Action Committee. That decision made sense only in hindsight: political consulting took me into villages, constituencies, districts, and states across Punjab, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Andhra Pradesh, meeting party workers, local leaders, NGOs, religious bodies, unions, and panchayat-level people. It gave me exactly the context I had been missing at my research desk in Seattle: how government actually works at different levels, how people think differently across states, how India looks once you leave the data tables and go to the ground.

I didn’t want to study India from a distance. I wanted to understand it directly, and that is the real reason I came back.

Was it the right decision?

I don’t know if it was the ideal decision in a traditional career sense. If I had stayed, maybe I would have finished the PhD and gone deeper into economics or statistics. That path had value too.

But the path I chose took me through political campaigns, education, data engineering, data science, NLP, generative AI, and now legal AI: a career that’s far less linear, but much richer in context. I paid some real costs for that: I restarted multiple times, took salary cuts, and felt behind compared to batchmates on more straightforward paths.

What I gained in return is something I still use every day: the ability to walk into an unfamiliar system and learn it from the inside, rather than from a dashboard. That started with the decision to leave the PhD and come back. At the time, it looked like I was leaving a path. Looking back, it was the beginning of my actual one.