If a chance meeting hadn’t led Tapas Sarangi to a PhD in Japan, things could have been very different: “I would probably have been in the Indian Navy as a commissioned officer!” he admits.

In the six or so months between finishing his Master’s at Utkal University in southeast India and beginning his PhD at KEK in Tsukuba, Tapas was preparing entrance exams for other institutes and giving walk-in interviews for jobs. A graduate of the National Cadet Core, he pursued a possible position in the Navy with particular zeal, attending a gruelling five-day interview designed to put candidates through their paces physically and mentally.

But Tapas was already in Japan by the time the results of the Navy selection process came through. After a conversation with his future supervisor, who was on a visit from KEK to Utkal, the previous August, Tapas found himself the recipient of a scholarship to go and study abroad. “They sent the invite letter in January, I went to Japan in March and started in April. So it all worked out pretty well,” he smiles.

In the end he swapped one sort of disciplined life – the armed forces, for another – the Japanese university system. The month-long camps he completed during his five years of cadet training – where the boys would be woken up at 4am and sent out to jog, then taken to the hills to learn map-reading, survival and firing skills – stood him in good stead for the rigours of life as a PhD student in Japan.

“All the students had their cubicles in a big hall… You get up and want to go home, but you see that on the right side of you, someone is still typing on their keyboard. On the left side, someone is still typing on their keyboard,” he remembers. “That’s a part of PhD life I really enjoyed,” he admits though, “you have to make it work, that’s the thing.”

Aside from adjusting to the working culture of long hours and relentless perfectionism, Tapas also experienced a shift in his perception of physics when he moved to KEK. “That’s when I realised that there was something besides textbooks: experiments, accelerators, detectors,” he explains. “There are not many experiments in Indian universities, so for me it was a big step doing a PhD in experimental particle physics.”

Living within another Asian culture was also a revelation for Tapas, who had not been abroad before. “The part of India where I grew up was very quiet. It was a city, but it wasn’t a metro city,” he says. As a life-long vegetarian who found himself in a country that loves its meat and fish, he laughs, “You have to know how to cook!”

Despite the shock of the new, he soon got used to seeing vending machines stuffed with anything and everything at every turn, being squashed into overflowing Tokyo subway trains by officials with sticks, and even learned to speak ‘survival Japanese’, likening his experience at KEK to CERN and the need (or lack thereof) to learn French.

At CERN, in his third year as a postdoc with the University of Wisconsin, Tapas is actively involved with both the SUSY and Standard Model working groups. He also does monitoring work for the High Level Trigger (HLT) Calo stream, and last year helped with the commissioning of new HLT computers.

At the end of his PhD, Tapas was so certain he wanted to come to CERN that he applied exclusively to LHC experiments, and specifically to groups that were based on-site at Meyrin. That way, he says, “you meet people more often, you discuss with them, and you learn every day.”

Out of work, he’s busy trying to recapture his past prowess in badminton and indulging what he terms a “physicists hobby”: photography. He takes trips to the lake at night to photograph the lights on the water, and often hikes the Jura with his camera, specifically in search of the best views. Snow is a particular favourite: “This is Indian subcontinent’s people’s dream, to see snow!”

Although Tapas's career path so far seems to have been a happy combination of focussed decision-making and serendipity, the next step is a little more uncertain. Home is calling, but returning is not as simple as it might be. “The time will come, after a few more years, where I’ll have to assess myself again and see where I belong. If I belong somewhere outside India, or if I have to go back.”