"A reflection on personal struggles, discovering what a PhD truly means, learning how to do meaningful research, embracing international standards, and growing through supportive supervisors and a global academic community."

Intro

Over the past few years, my journey as a young researcher at VIT Chennai has been a story of curiosity slowly transforming into purpose. It began with a simple question: How can artificial intelligence and machine learning strengthen cybersecurity? What started as small experiments, scattered notes, and long evenings exploring the basics gradually evolved into a deep and enduring passion. My early industry experience as a junior DevSecOps engineer exposed me to real-world security challenges, and it was during those days that I realised AI and cybersecurity were not just subjects I was interested in, they were the left and right eyes through which I viewed my professional identity.

As I progressed in my research, my curiosity pulled me deeper into the world of research, This passion eventually drew me more deeply into the world of international research. To me, research is not about chasing a degree or the title of "doctor," but about pursuing questions that genuinely matter, questions that challenge us, frustrate us, push us beyond our limits, and ultimately transform who we become.

In this blog, I share that journey. Not just the technical milestones, but the process of learning how to think like a researcher, how to approach problems with honesty and curiosity, and how to survive the endless cycle of experiments, failures, revisions, and small breakthroughs.

I also reflect on what it meant to undertake this path across two countries India and Australia, as part of a Joint PhD program. This experience brought with it new expectations, cultural differences, academic systems, supportive supervisors, and countless late-night experiments that shaped not just my thesis, but who I am today as a researcher. :::

Quick links

My Joint PhD journey:When Opportunity Met Determination
How to schedule meetings, what to expect, what is expected
Finding My Direction: From Random Reading to Purposeful Research
Tools and Templates
Looking ahead

My Joint PhD journey: When Opportunity Met Determination

During my early research years at VIT Chennai, I had the privilege of working under the supervision of Prof. Syed Ibrahim, who has been an exceptional guide, mentor, and constant source of support. His belief in my potential shaped the confidence with which I approached research.

One day, I was given an unexpected opportunity, to present my work to an international professor for feedback on my PhD direction. I had no idea that this presentation would become a turning point in my life. Shortly after, VIT Chennai and Deakin University formalised an academic partnership, opening the door for students to pursue a Joint PhD across two countries.

I encountered a variety of reactions: encouragement, constructive criticism, and well-intentioned caution. As I explored this path, many people advised me to think carefully:

"Think twice. It will be challenging. Two supervisors, two countries, two academic systems, and double expectations."

But a different question echoed in my mind: "If so many students pursue their PhD in Australia, why not me?"

I believed that if I remained sincere, disciplined, and deeply passionate about my work, I could rise to the challenge. With that conviction, I reached out to Prof. Gang Li at Deakin University through my VIT supervisor(Prof. Syed Ibrahim), and shortly thereafter, Dr. Ansam Khraisat joined as my associate supervisor. After reviewing my work and understanding the direction I hoped to pursue, Prof. Gang Li offered to supervise me under the Joint PhD program. Accepting that offer and officially enrolling at Deakin became one of the most defining and transformative decisions of my academic career.

This journey demanded that I navigate two academic environments, two supervisory teams, and two sets of expectations, all while holding on to a single cohesive research vision. Yet, this challenge gave me something far more valuable: a broadened understanding of what it truly means to be a researcher.

Working across Chennai and Melbourne helped me see cybersecurity problems from multiple dimensions:

Learning how to think like a researcher asking deeper questions, identifying gaps, and finding meaning beyond results.
Understanding what to do in real-world research designing rigorous experiments, validating assumptions, and addressing practical constraints.
Recognising the real risks and responsibilities a researcher carries when working on security topics that can impact organisations and individuals globally.

This cross-cultural experience did more than refine my technical skills, it fundamentally transformed how I think, how I work, and how I grow as a researcher.

How to Schedule Meetings, What to Expect, and What Is Expected

Managing meetings with supervisors is a crucial part of the PhD journey. It not only keeps your research on track but also shapes your discipline, clarity, and growth as a researcher. Over time, I learned that structured communication can make the entire supervision process productive and meaningful. Here are the key lessons that guided me:

Maintain a consistent meeting routine. Aim for at least one meeting per week with each supervisor. A fixed rhythm helps in maintaining momentum and ensures that feedback is continuous and actionable.
Prepare a presentation for every meeting. Create a simple PPT slide deck summarising:
- what you accomplished since the last meeting,
- what challenges you faced,
- what you plan to do next,
- and where you need guidance.
This structure shows professionalism and helps supervisors understand your progress instantly.
Build a strong literature foundation. Collect and organise relevant journals, surveys, and conference papers that are directly connected to your problem or research topic. Extract the purpose of each method, understand how others solved the problem, and analyse where the gaps remain.
Develop your own perspective. Research is not just summarising others' work. You must form an opinion on:
- what needs to be addressed,
- why it is important,
- and how your idea can solve it.
This is how you shape your novelty and contribution.
Define your domain and problem statement clearly. From the beginning, articulate:
- the scope of your domain,
- your exact problem statement,
- why this problem matters,
- and whom it impacts.
Clarity in problem formulation is the foundation of strong research.
Set clear objectives for each chapter of your thesis. As your research progresses, outline the objective and contribution of each chapter. This helps you track how your work evolves and ensures that each contribution aligns with the overall thesis.
Respect your supervisors' time. Maintain your schedules in a calendar, prepare well, and avoid requesting unnecessary meetings. Discipline in communication demonstrates maturity and builds trust. Quality meetings are far more productive than frequent unplanned ones.

In essence, effective supervision is built on preparation, clarity, respect, and consistency. These habits not only strengthen your research but also shape you into a more confident and independent researcher.

Finding My Direction: From Random Reading to Purposeful Research

My PhD journey did not begin with a perfect roadmap. Like many first-time researchers, I stepped into the field with more curiosity than direction. In those early months, I tried to understand cybersecurity and AI by reading almost everything I could find survey papers, conference articles, book chapters, and any paper indexed in Scopus. I built Excel sheets to track references, mapped connections between different ideas, and prepared summary presentations for my supervisors.

But despite all the effort, something still felt unclear. I was absorbing information, but not developing a research identity. That's when my professor gave me one of the most transformative pieces of advice in my entire journey:

"Stop reading everything. Read only what is truly world-class."

He asked me to focus exclusively on top-tier, high-impact journals and A* conferences, the places where the strongest ideas, most rigorous methods, and future-shaping innovations are published. Only then did I realise that research is not about quantity of reading, but the quality of thinking.

This completely changed how I approached literature review. Instead of drowning in hundreds of papers, I began carefully studying the foundational works, the ones that shaped the evolution of intrusion detection, anomaly detection, continual learning, temporal models, and zero-shot security analytics. I analysed not only what the authors wrote, but why they made certain design choices, what their limitations were, and where the research gaps still existed.

Some of the major high-ranking journals and A* conferences that shaped my early understanding include top IEEE Transactions, high-impact journals relevant to my topic, and prestigious venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, ICML, ACM CCS, and USENIX Security, among others.

Studying such papers showed me what real scientific contribution looks like, clarity of motivation, rigor in methodology, honesty in limitations, and depth in evaluation. Most importantly, they helped me understand what my contribution could be.

That shift from reading broadly to reading purposefully, marked the true beginning of my PhD journey

Writing Papers: Experiments, Failures, and Small Wins

Writing a research paper is one of the most challenging and transformative stages of the PhD journey. It forces you to confront the core question: What exactly is my contribution? Your novelty, methodology, experiments, and insights must all come together in a coherent and convincing story.

After each major presentation or review meeting, I would begin drafting my manuscript. Over time, I learned a structure that made the process clearer and far more manageable:

Start with the methodology. Begin by formulating the problem, defining your assumptions, explaining your model architecture, and detailing the theory behind your approach. Once the methodology is clear, the rest of the paper naturally builds around it.
Design experiments that answer your research questions. The experimental setup must be rigorous, transparent, and reproducible. Each choice dataset, metric, baseline, model parameter, should be justified. Clarity in this section is crucial for validating your work.
Write the introduction after the methodology is settled. A strong introduction typically contains:
- a brief overview of the field,
- the core problem and why it matters,
- limitations of existing methods,
- how your approach addresses those gaps, and
- a concise list of your contributions.
Structure the related work with critical analysis. Categorise the literature meaningfully and highlight how previous approaches differ from yours. End this section by summarising the research gap that motivates your contribution.
Conclude with purpose. Your conclusion should reflect what you achieved, what limitations remain, and what future directions your work opens up.

Throughout the writing process, it is important to pay attention to the fine details:

use abbreviations, symbols, and notation consistently,
explain technical terms with short definitions when needed,
describe every table and figure clearly, each must serve a purpose,
reduce unnecessary bullet points and maintain academic flow.

Of course, not every idea worked, and that is an essential part of this story. Some models that appeared promising in theory were extremely difficult to train in practice or ran too slowly for realistic network speeds. A few experiments failed simply because the data preprocessing pipeline was not robust enough.

Yet, every failure brought clarity. I learned which constraints truly matter for the systems. These setbacks shaped my understanding far more deeply than the successful experiments alone.

In the end, writing papers is not just documenting results, it is documenting your growth as a researcher. It captures your reasoning, your struggles, your insights, and the small wins that make the journey meaningful.

Tools and Templates

A PhD journey is not built on ideas alone, it is built on the tools that help organise, refine, and present those ideas. Over time, I realised that having the right digital toolkit not only improved my productivity but also brought clarity, discipline, and structure into my research life.

One of the first resources that changed the way I wrote papers was the TemplateX repository on GitHub. It provided clean and professional LaTeX templates for reports, theses, and research papers. Instead of fighting with formatting or trying to fix errors in the document structure, I could finally focus on what mattered most, my ideas, my experiments, and my writing.

Alongside this, I relied heavily on Overleaf. It became my main writing space, where every draft slowly evolved into a polished manuscript. The collaborative editing, change tracking, and cloud access made it incredibly easy to work seamlessly with my supervisors across two countries.

As my projects grew, I learned that each research paper deserved its own dedicated space. So I began maintaining a GitHub repository for each paper, storing datasets, experimental scripts, figures, evaluation logs, and documentation. These repositories became living records of my progress, showing how an idea developed from a rough sketch into a complete and reproducible project.

To keep everything safe and accessible, I used OneDrive and Google Drive as my backup hubs. Every presentation, meeting note, dataset, figure, and manuscript draft had a home in the cloud. Whether I was in Chennai, travelling, or working from Melbourne, my entire research environment travelled with me.

I also built a carefully curated digital library of research papers, stored neatly as folders. These included: top-tier journals and conferences (IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, USENIX), relevant datasets, foundational theoretical articles, and survey papers for broader understanding.

Having fast access to these papers made literature review smoother and helped me understand how my work fit into the larger research landscape.

In the end, these tools and templates became more than just platforms, they became companions in my journey. They supported my writing, safeguarded my progress, organised my ideas, and helped me build a consistent and disciplined workflow. A well-chosen toolkit does not make a PhD effortless, but it makes the path clearer, more structured, and far more manageable.

Looking ahead

Even though completing my thesis is a significant milestone, I see it as a checkpoint rather than an endpoint. There is still so much more to explore, extending my research to real-time environments, collaborating with industry, and contributing to projects that have direct impact on modern cybersecurity challenges.

I hope that the methods and ideas developed during this journey go beyond academic benchmarks. My vision is for these approaches to grow into resilient, trustworthy security systems that help protect real users, real organisations, and critical infrastructure. As I look ahead, I carry with me the same curiosity and determination that shaped my PhD journey, ready to keep learning, innovating, and contributing to the evolving landscape of AI-driven cybersecurity.

Acknowledgements

This journey would not have been possible without the unwavering guidance of my supervisors Prof. Gang Li, Prof. Syed Ibrahim, and Dr. Ansam Khraisat. Their expert advice, constant support, kindness, and willingness to understand my difficult moments meant more than I can express. I am grateful for the support of both my universities, and for the encouragement and unwavering strength of my family, friends, and colleagues who believed in my work, even on the days when experiments failed, code broke, and results refused to cooperate. Their belief carried me forward when I needed it the most.