JOIN USThough in his second year of mechanical engineering, K V S Vaibhav was always interested in astronomy and wanted to know more about the field.
“I was interested in the theoretical part of astronomy for quite some time now and was wondering if I could take it up as a career option,” said the student at SRM University in Chennai.
A few students like Vaibhav, who are exploring a career in astronomy, have finished a five-day workshop in Bengaluru. The students came from Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru and Patna. The workshop was organised by The Climber, a startup presently being incubated at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
The workshop involved visiting prominent research institutions in the city and meeting experts in the field. For example, students visited the Raman Research Institute to learn about the Distortion experiments designed to explore the early history of our universe and witness state-of-art ultrafast lasers in the institute’s Optics Lab.
At the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, which played an integral part in the discovery of Gravitational Waves, students listened to sessions with string theorists and black hole researchers. The MP Birla Institute of Fundamental Research and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) were other institutions the students visited.
“There was a lot of learning. For example, we got to meet Prof Arnab Raychaudhari at the IISc, a renowned astrophysicist who has written books on the subject that are used at Oxford. Meeting scientists of that calibre does not happen every day. At the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, I got to know that a number of mechanical engineers were required for the 30-metre telescope project,” Vaibhav said. The TMT project is about one of the world’s most advanced and next generation telescopes.
K V S Vaibhav, a student: “There was a lot of learning. We got to meet Prof Arnab Raychaudhari at the IISc, a renowned astrophysicist who has written books that are used at Oxford. Meeting scientists of that calibre does not happen every day. At the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, I got to know that a number of mechanical engineers were required for the
30-metre telescope project.