I was already in the 4th year of my PhD before I began to understand my failure in being a PhD student, as well as what drives my passion for physics research. It was not until my personal mental breakdown that I could start to see where the problem lies - the pervasive underlying feeling that I do not belong anywhere. Stuck in imposter syndrome, unable to explain my thought process or ideas to anyone in the group and, many times, even to myself, my sense of self was completely shattered, and I was definitely convinced that I not only failed at being a PhD student but also at being a good human being. When I hit my rock bottom, I felt crushed to a point where I was almost ready to give up. Every single day, I used to envision quitting everything in my life, which at least was a respite from the overwhelming anxiety.

One of the perks of using Linux is the freedom I get to tweak around and customize the user interface to my liking. Initially, I started with Unity then shifted to KDE, which is very customizable when I finally took up a tiling window manager without looking back. This article describes the setup I use and how you can replicate it. I am working on Arch Linux, but the same applies on any other distro with just minor changes.

All the problems that we solved until our undergraduation involved balls falling freely in gravity, boxes sliding down an inclined plane or two monkeys hanging on a pulley. We know that all such problems have a solution, only if we were as creative to come up with a way out. What about a slightly complicated problem? For example, we want to understand the flow of fluid through a complex set of pipes or the evolution of a gas in a nano cavity. We can quickly understand that we can no longer solve them by hand. It is not only difficult but also cumbersome. In some cases, there is no analytical solution available for even a marginally complex system like the quantum mechanical solutions of an electron in a molecule. Numerical solution gives us a way to get over these obstacles and observe the properties of real world systems.