Hello all! I thought I'd take a few minutes to give everyone in the sub a bit of encouragement as we are waste deep in another semester of grad school. If you work in cancer (or watch college basketball) you are probably familiar with the story of Jimmy V. Every year around this time ESPN will replay his speech from the ESPYs shortly before his death which if you haven't seen it I highly encourage you to watch it because it's an excellent talk on how to live life. However, whether you watch it or not I want to highlight a particular quote from the speech that I think we can all use in our pursuit of our graduate degrees and that I keep taped to my laptop to remind me no matter what the day entails:

"Don't give up. Don't ever give up."

While this quote originally refers to cancer patients battling their illnesses, I think we as graduate students can take this statement to heart. From the minute we start our prospective programs we will be hit with obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. We will fail exams, we will have projects that fizzle out, our hypothesizes will be disproved halfway through our thesis, papers will be rejected, grants will be rejected, we will all feel moments of unworthiness and no matter what we do reviewer #2 will hate our experimental model. We will all go through periods where we feel that we know, without question that we will never finish and there is absolutely no way we belong here. But no matter what happens, no matter what challenge you are facing always remember DON'T EVER GIVE UP. All of us belong here, all of us are experts in our chosen field, all of us are capable of truly incredible things as long as we DON'T EVER GIVE UP. No matter what you are working on your work will one day change the world, your work will one day be a piece of knowledge that has never been known to human kind before, your work will one day be something that other students (who now are in your shoes) will cite on the way to their own thesis. So remember that no matter what you are facing DON'T EVER GIVE UP. You are more capable than you realize you are, you deserve to be here because you got here on YOUR own merits and abilities, you belong here. When experiments fail, learn from the mistakes and optimize the experiment. When papers get rejected, resubmit and resubmit and resubmit until your work gets accepted. When you feel overpowering imposter syndrome, remember that you were chosen to be at your program by extremely smart people who knew that you and you alone were capable of earning your perspective degree because of your abilities and merits, so you belong here and you most certainly are not an imposter. When reviewer #2 berates you over how bad the design of your experiment was explain to them, as the expert of your project and area of research that you are, how this model is exactly the right one for this paper (also thank him for input 😅). No one here is alone, 80k members of this subreddit have/are/will go through the exact things you are going through right now, but all of us can get through this, all of us are capable of doing this and all of us will get through this as long as we don't ever give up.

I hope you take these words to heart and that they can help you get through the challenges you face. Please feel free to reach out to me if you need someone to talk to to work through problems, vent, need a laugh, whatever I'm always happy to help keep my peers pushing forward.