In my "Life without Penny" series the four male principal characters in TBBT split up. Only Sheldon stays at Caltech, Leonard returns home to Princeton, Howard moves to the Kennedy Space Centre and Raj returns to his alma mater of Cambridge University. What happened to Raj? Part 5 - Cambridge Return.
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Raj was soon hard at work in Cambridge, getting up to speed with the challenges of being a University lecturer. He wasn't given any supervisory or teaching duties in his first term. He was busy preparing for the challenges of undergraduate lecturing, he got himself familiar with the material that he would be teaching and sat in on some of lectures given by his colleagues.
He got reacquainted with Professor Anderson, his old Ph.D supervisor. Raj became an unofficial member of the Anderson research group. Anderson had warned his female colleagues about Raj's problems talking to women. After the departure of Dr. Jones for Edinburgh there was now only one female astrophysics lecturer, who soon got used to her colleagues strange behaviour.
Two months after Raj returned to Cambridge he moved out of Wolfson college accommodation into an apartment close to the Physics department. As a farewell gift Wolfson invited him to become a college fellow. By the end of his first term Raj had got used to the strange world of Cambridge University, in some ways it felt as if he had never left. However, there was a downside to this, after living for so long in Southern California he had his first cold winter in 8 years, he hadn't seen snow for a long time!
in all this time Raj kept in email contact with Sheldon, Leonard and Howard. in January, as Raj prepared for his first term of teaching, came the news that Leonard was in a relationship with Leslie Winkle. At the start of the term Raj officially became co-supervisor of two of Professor Anderson's postgraduate students. These students were not scheduled to finish for another 18 months, after Anderson had officially retired. Emeritus Professor Anderson would still be around after retirement but Raj would take over the day to day supervision duties. Raj gave a lecture course in introductory astrophysics, it was hard work at first but he soon found his own idiosyncratic lecture style, he found that provided he didn't look directly at any female students he could lecture to them. Raj got his postgraduate students to help out with the supervision sessions with any female students. Raj also did some research supervision of final year undergraduate students, he gave them some of his Hawaii telescope data to analyse.
Raj made it to the end of his first term of teaching, it had been hard work but it had all worked out in the end. He that knew he now had a break from teaching until the next academic year in the autumn. Then he got an email from Caltech.
From: Leonard dot Hofstadter at phys dot caltech dot edu
To: Raj dot Koothrappali at cam dot ac dot uk
Dear Raj
I am going to get married to Leslie Winkle in 3 months time, we would like to invite you to the wedding. Howard has also been invited, Sheldon is going to be best man. We do hope that you can make it.
Leonard and Leslie
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A week later Raj had his usual weekly video chat with his parents.
"Hello Mummy and Daddy, greetings from Cambridge. Oh hello Priya, nice to see you again."
Dr. Koothrappali then spoke "Rajesh, your sister has some news for you."
"I am getting married in just under 3 months timeā¦"
