I’m happy to share that I've completed my Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at Hindustan University! I finished a journey that I started 4 years and 11 months ago. My research is about "QoS-aware Service Migrations in Multi-Access Edge Computing". I'm thankful to Dr Thangakumar J (my research guide), Dr.V.Ceronmani Sharmila and Dr. Vallikannu Alagappan, who kept me motivated, pushed me to reach newer heights and lent a helping hand whenever I was stuck in the journey. Yesterday (29th Aug 2025), my viva voce was completed. I defended my thesis in front of an expert panel, qualifying to receive the Ph.D degree.
Why did I even sign up for Ph.D?
Let me take you back to the year 2020. I had some spare time during the Covid lockdown, I started writing a few blog posts about 5G. Then I asked myself "You are already known as a blogger. Why not just author a book?". I started authoring a book on 5G networks. It took me nearly 6 months to finish the book and I published the book via Notion Press and Kindle Publishing Platform in July 2020. Little did I knew at that time that the book would be later-on picked by leading universities such as Anna University, Bennett University and Christ University as a text book in their syllabus.
While I published the book, I felt that many authors were "Doctorates" and I didn't have the "Dr." initials. Around the same time, a friend of mine (Dr. Sundararaman Chintamani) completed his Ph.D at the age of 60. I thought age is no barrier to pursuing our academic goals and signed up for the Ph.D program at Hindustan University, Chennai.
The Journey
The initial journey was quite easy... as most tasks were done online. I completed the course work (studied and wrote assignments/exams for 4 subjects) and published my first survey paper in an IEEE conference in the first year.
The journey became difficult after that... finalizing a research topic, getting the research environment ready etc., took a lot of time. I got the idea for my research by attending several online viva voce sessions. One of the researchers had used Particle Swarm Optimization in their research work. Out of curiosity, I read more about PSO... and found that I could do research in Edge Computing using PSO. I learned Python and wrote nearly 2000 lines of Python code to create my simulation environment. That was quite a bit of learning. Once I had the simulation environment ready, then performing the tests, getting the results, benchmarking against other state-of-the-art algorithms became easy.
I published my research articles in journals and conferences, meeting the minimum eligibility requirement (2 journal papers + 2 conference publications) for Ph.D by April 2024. Unfortunately, my guide had to move out of Hindustan University. I was assigned a new guide... as per the "unwritten process", you have to publish a new paper under the guideship of the new guide to complete your Ph.D. It took me another 1 year to get another conference publication under the guideship of the new guide. I completed my synopsis/thesis submission by April 2025. I received the comments from the reviewers in August 2025 and finished my viva voce also in the same month... on the 29th August 2025.
I always tell others that for faster goal achievement, you need to have 3 people - a role model (who has already accomplished the goal), a mentor/guide (who guides you to achieve the goal) and a buddy (who is also pursuing the same journey). My role model for Ph.D was Dr. Sundararaman Chintamani. My mentor/guides were Dr. Thangakumar, Dr. Ceronmani Sharmila and Dr. Vallikannu from Hindustan University. My buddies were Musthafa Sheriff, Jinu Sainudeen and Michael Dinesh. All of these individuals had a direct impact on the successful completion of my Ph.D journey.
The Message
Quite often we sign up for something... but, while we make progress we find obstacles, hardships and challenges along the way. When my heart told "Saro! It's not your cup of tea... just give up and move on", my mind said "Saro! You should be a role model for others.. most importantly, your children. Just hold tight and finish your journey". Whenever I fell down, I jumped back up, dusting off the dirt, pushing myself hard.. almost limping to the finishing line.
Today, it feels as if I moved a mountain. When I reflect upon the journey, I feel that I've now developed more capacity to handle greater challenges. The new "Dr." initials that I've acquired would remind me of the Dream, Drive and Determination !
My sincere thanks to everyone who played their little part in helping me to complete this journey.
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