Thread by @SunshineMenezes, Students, lend me your ears:You can't win if you don't play.Yep, I [...]

Students, lend me your ears:

You can't win if you don't play.

Yep, I have the same personal motto as the lottery.

Here's why:

It's easy for us to tell ourselves that we're not good enough, or smart enough, or rich enough, or whatever enough to get picked for a fellowship or job. Those little (or big) self-defeating demons can crawl up into our brains and convince us that it's just not worth the effort.

But the reality is that you don't know what the review committee is looking for. Maybe the thing that makes you an unusual candidate is EXACTLY the thing that makes you a perfect candidate.

Or, maybe, your timing is really good (stay tuned for my own story about this).

Either way, it doesn't matter. Your goal is to get the opportunities that build your skills, provide new experiences, open new doors, and help you figure out what you want to do after you graduate.

When I was an oceanography PhD student, my advisor told me about a fully-funded fellowship to study the ecology of fragmented forests in the Brazilian Amazon.

Did this have anything to do with my oceanographic research? No.

Was it helping me make connections in my field? No.

So why did my advisor even tell me about this? Because my family is Brazilian, I speak (conversational) Portuguese, my advisor knew that I'd been to the Amazon once and loved it, and, most importantly, he never thought I'd get this fellowship in a million years.

I mean, why would I get it? I was studying OCEANOGRAPHY. So advisor thought he'd look like a great guy for encouraging me to apply without any fear that I'd get distracted with a one month trip out of the country to do something entirely unrelated to my dissertation.

The fellowship was intended to fund two U.S. students to attend this program in Brazil, as a collaboration b/w the US and Brazilian governments. The only catch was that the field course was taught entirely in Portuguese.

So, I applied. You can't win if you don't play.

Second catch: you had to propose a research project. So I crafted an application, in Portuguese, and said that I'd study soil protists, the closest I could come to the marine phytoplankton I was studying for my PhD. I didn't really know anything about soil protists. Ahem.

I had a Brazilian scientist friend (a physical oceanographer, who also knew nothing about soil protists!) review the application for me to make sure that my application wasn't total hogwash. (Remember, I'd never learned scientific Portuguese before, this was entirely new for me.)

And then I submitted it! And promptly assumed that I'd never hear anything back because, again, I was an oceanographer purporting to study Amazonian ecology.

I was accepted!!!!

I couldn't believe my luck. Neither could my advisor.

And do you know why I was accepted?...

Because I was the ONLY applicant for these two spots in the entire United States of America.

The only one. In the whole country.

I'll admit I was a little embarrassed about that at first. Did I really deserve this? Was I only selected because there was no one else to select?

And then I realized it didn't matter. I had this incredible, once in a lifetime opportunity immerse myself in Amazonian ecology.

I pushed all my boundaries for those 4 weeks: struggled to learn a new field in a second language, stressed about scorpions in my hammock, got lost (for 5 minutes) in the Amazon, learned how to dance Forro (kind of), learned why I'm not a tropical ecologist.

I also had more fun than I ever could have imagined. I loved it.

And I have never used any of that science since. But who cares? I threw my hat in the ring.

I played and I won.

Never be the one to take away your own chances.

/Fim

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