Researching fault detections and diagnostics at McMaster will be one more step towards his entrepreneurial dreams

For Dhruv Gupta of New Delhi, India, reading a popular comic about graduate school contributed to his dream of achieving a doctorate degree as part of an innovative career. For now though, he’s focused on finishing his Bachelor of Technology in Chemical Engineering which includes a Mitacs Globalink internship at McMaster University this summer. But if his brief but already busy time in Canada so far is any indication, Dhruv is sure to have a promising few months in Canada while he researches controls diagnostics under Professor Mhaskar Prashant.

While studying at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, Dhruv’s friends told him about the Mitacs Globalink program and how he too could come to Canada to complete a research internship at a well-respected Canadian university. Though he and his parents had  some initial apprehensions about a journey half-way around the world, the stories Dhruv’s friends and classmates told of Canada and of Mitacs Globalink convinced them all that it would be a worthwhile trip to make, especially for discovering which graduate schools he could possibly attend.

Dhruv admits that he didn’t know much about Canada before he came. “Canada was completely unknown to me but I now know that Canada is good for graduate studies— and from a cultural standpoint it’s a very comfortable place to be.”

Having already met with a few senior government officials during a visit to the Canadian Parliament and having presented in the Bromley lecture series at the University of Ottawa, Dhruv has shown his abilities as a natural leader and communicator - traits that will serve him well in his future career as an entrepreneur. His exploratory mindset has already led him to take day trips throughout Ontario on his weekends away from the laboratory, where he engages in his favorite past-time as a mountaineering enthusiast.

However, despite his many accomplishments, and unlike the main character of his favorite comic, Dhruv does not expect to receive a Nobel Prize simply for completing grad school. Instead, he’s quite happy to continue learning and advancing his career. “I want a PhD so that I can be educated to a professional level and continue to innovate as an entrepreneur […and to] keep my business connected to Canada.”