Thank You YRSI - Young Researchers for Societal Impact

Do mosquitoes like Skrillex? Do they like cheese? What direction do dogs do their business in? These are just a handful of questions with which we kicked off our first skill session. Now, as the audience, you might be wondering as to what Skrillex has to do with our research project, and trust me, all of the fifty brains in the cohort were wondering the same thing too.

What started off as a few abnormal questions to Ameya going to the extent of replicating our stringent physical education teachers, making us all do the same old boring set of exercises to get us into the mood to learn about qualitative and quantitative research, the past few weeks have been a magnificent journey, with humor, analysis and research all being just part of the enjoyment.

I think, personally, YRSI has given us all something to reflect on. From day one of the program, our mentors have been guiding us to ask the right questions and look at our world from a different perspective. They’ve constantly been pushing us to go the extra mile and get the job done, and speaking from a very procrastinating side of myself, I did not like that. But jokes aside, I want to take this time to thank YRSI for all the knowledge and skill it has offered me, for the wonderful mentors and guides, for the memorable conversations with Ameya, talking about our antics during school classes and lastly, for such a wonderful cohort.

Working on a topic as vast and broad as COVID-19 was definitely not easy. Our mentors though, Srikanth and Raunaq, were most helpful and always very open to hear our judgement and reflect on certain aspects of our research. For the tremendous amount of work, they’ve done, going over two presentations, a twenty odd page research paper thrice and leaving the most detailed of comments each time, they most certainly deserve a huge shout-out, and I would thus like to thank the both of them.

Continuing on this journey of gratitude, I would also like to thank the wonderful cohort I have been a part of. From the in-chat debates, to the hilarious comments on and off of chat, the cohort has been amazingly knowledgeable and my teammates especially, have been off the charts. Constantly pushing me to do better, giving me constructive criticism, my teammates have been some of the most fascinating people you’d meet, and I am ecstatic I worked with them for the past few weeks.

Now, I know I’m going a bit off time here, and surely all of you must be thinking, why I still haven’t shut my mouth. Believe me, my teammates were thinking the same thing for the past few weeks. I just cannot stop talking, and that clearly reflects why I didn’t sing, or perform an instrumental piece today. But, on a serious note, I would like to conclude my small rant with a very meaningful quote.

‘Gratitude is the memory of the heart’ said Jean Baptist Massieu, and rightly so. Once again, I would like to thank everyone at YLAC, my mentors for this program, the wonderful cohort, and my lively teammates. I shall now leave you to whatever it is you were all doing before but I would like to end this conclusion with something more meaningful than a quote.

For those of you who keep waging wars against those annoying bloodsucking parasites, I thought you should know this, and you can definitely thank me later. For those of you who didn’t google it up already, yes, mosquitoes do hate Skrillex. And how on earth do I know this? It is just another one of those million amazing things courtesy of YLSI. Thank you so much everyone, for letting me gobble up your time. Thank you YLSI. Thank you everyone!