At the center of a 5’ by 8’ kitchen island spans a wide sheet of yellow khandvi, a traditional Indian dish made from gram flour. Carefully aligning the scraper’s edge to the end of the sheet, Ramit Goyal (12) transforms the plain thick dough into cylindrical spirals. He then places them into dishes while adding the final garnishes and passes out the dish as friends and family surround the table, joining to enjoy this delicacy. 

Ramit began his cooking journey during the pandemic, a time when he had a lot of free time and school work was at its lightest. As an Indian American, Ramit became interested in Indian food while exploring cooking.

“There was a lot of time to explore, and I would say that’s the time where I got to explore Indian food,” Ramit said. “Especially because I’m an Indian American, I learned how Indian food is made from my mom and from my grandparents after which I was able to start making vegan alternatives to traditional Indian recipes.”

However, challenges came in the way of Ramit’s cooking endeavors, particularly in his vegan recipes which he started creating because of his vegan brother. With the ultimate goal of finding a vegan alternative while maintaining the original taste of dairy or meat, he found particular difficulty in replacing traditional dairy products like regular milk and yogurt. Although he faced numerous setbacks during his trials and errors with recipes, Ramit considers all the obstacles he encountered as learning experiences. 

“When you try to make dishes like sweet Indian treats, you traditionally put in regular milk,” Ramit said. “If you put soy milk into it, it ends up being way too bitter, so that is a dead end. But, it is not a dead end because now I know that soy milk does not work as for vegan recipes, and I ended up using oat milk. These dead ends that I find in cooking are not failures but are ways you realize that some things don’t work.”

Close friend Jordan Labio (12) comments on Ramit’s tenacious nature when it comes to learning new things. Rather than giving up, Ramit strives to dig even deeper and resolve questions he has. 

“One special thing about him is that he’s always willing to learn,” Jordan said. “He always asks questions to the teacher even though they might be considered dumb questions. He’s not afraid to learn.”

Ramit also applied his lesson learned from cooking to another passion of his: research. During his junior year summer, Ramit conducted computational biology research that focused on understanding how protein structure is related to disease-causing mutations. His research identified a key metric, the relative solvent accessible surface area value, which indicates the position of amino acids with a protein. 

With this information in mind, Ramit predicted that mutations occurring in the protein core would more likely lead to disease due to structural destabilization while surface mutations might be less impactful. This hypothesis proved to be correct as he found that mutations in structurally critical regions, such as the protein core, were more likely to disrupt protein function and contribute to disease pathology, while mutations in the peripheral regions had a lesser effect. However, a different complication arose during his research. 

“The dead end part of my research was when I realized that the change in the rSASA value for the amino acid where the mutation occurs is the same for both disease causing mutations and benign mutations,” Ramit said. “That was my dead end because I thought that the change in the rSASA value would determine whether the mutation was going to be disease causing or not.”

Such setbacks did not stop Ramit. Instead, he recognized the value of exploring avenues that proved to be dead ends and realized that while these paths may look unproductive at first glance, overcoming complications was actually an integral part of the research process. Despite encountering setbacks, he draws motivation and passion for research when experimental results align with his hypothesis. 

“How do we work across failures? I wouldn’t say there are failures in research,” Ramit said. “But when you were not expecting something, you have a hypothesis and your research proves otherwise, how do you work around that? How do you pivot, how do you adapt to those results? Because you can’t lie about data, and you can’t rely on results, so you have to work with the results you have, regardless of what your hypothesis was.

Upper school history teacher James Tate also applauds Ramit’s curiosity and attitude during class. Rather than being content with given information, Ramit transcends expectations and tries to approach class material in a different way. 

“Ramit was really good about always asking questions that tied new things learned to old things we already learned,” Tate said.  “He made sure that there is a sense of continuity between time periods and subjects and ideas and asked great questions that sort of cover everything we’re learning about.”

In research, he also finds parallels to his experiences in cooking. He encountered instances where his expectations for his research diverged from his hypothesis just like how he faced unexpected outcomes in his culinary pursuit.  

“When you cook, a lot of different things that you expect to come up are not the way they come out,” Ramit said. “I remember when I was making a dish, I was expecting that I would add salt or different ingredients, but it ended up not being bland. My experience with research is similar. I’m finding ways that won’t work, and finding those ways that won’t work is important because those are parts of research that often people tend to overlook or not appreciate.”