Hello lovely readers! Can you believe that this is my final blog post? It seems like it was yesterday that I met the other bloggers to get our pictures taken. Writing for this blog has been an amazing experience and it was wonderful to meet so many inspiring people who, like me, shared their experiences with you through this blog.
The past year was a really wild ride. After the initial excitement of starting my graduate studies I quickly got a reality check when my budget fell apart. From that point onward it just seemed to keep going downhill. Job opportunities fell through, there did not seem to be enough hours in my days, and every single scholarship application I sent off was rejected. I have written about dealing with rejection before but I wanted to take this opportunity to say once more that its ok to struggle with it. I have met so many other grad students this year who all have amazing projects and theses and its one of the hardest things to be passionate about a project and believe that it would be a great contribution to the current scholarship and then see it get rejected by several selection committees.
During my undergrad I used to receive scholarships all the time and it was such a challenge to see that change during the first year of my graduate degree. My hard work used to be rewarded and then everything I did just never seemed to be enough. Experiencing failure upon failure really took the wind out of my sails for months and I started to question everything I was doing. Several times I felt like maybe I was not good enough and imposter syndrome hit me like a bus.
It took me until May to let go of that mindset. Until then there did not really seem to be a point in continuing to apply for scholarships and awards. However, I finally started to look past all the rejection and (perceived) failure and realized that its only a real failure if you stop trying. So I continued to apply for scholarships if it should work out this time it would be great and if it does not there will always be another opportunity. You know if one door closes another will open. I just hope that I’ll find an open door soon, it would make my bank account look less sad.
Anyway, despite all the difficulties the past year had in store for me (or maybe even because of them) I am super excited for what is to come. I managed to find my rhythm and I am more confident about what I am doing compared to when I started this adventure. I am beyond excited about my thesis topic and I am really sinking my teeth into it. I’m positively obsessed about it and I have an ever growing list of Latin text references and colour-coded notes. (I’m not crazy I swear, I just have a thing for notes). Seriously though, colour-coding really helps to keep you organized. I also found that its important to have an extra notebook for any ideas I have during my research. I won’t be able to cover everything in my thesis but some of the ideas I have during my research might lead to other projects in the future. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll hit the books again. Until next time!