SER SPC Presidents Message
Students and Postdocs! Welcome to 2024! I hope you had a healthy and restorative winter break and are ready to leap into the new year (I could not help the pun. I hope you will either appreciate it or groan mildly). I was reading over our past-president (Sharia Ahmed)’s words from last year, and if she’ll allow me, I’d like to borrow quite a few. Sharia very eloquently wrote about self-care and mental health, and I want to echo those sentiments. Graduate training is hard! For a myriad of reasons, some less tangible than others, which makes them all the more frustrating to navigate. And the challenges of graduate training, establishing your career are happening in conjunction with personal and social stuff. Life doesn’t stop because you’re in graduate school. And at times, being a graduate student contributes to the challenges. We can be honest about the financial difficulties associated with living on a PhD stipend and being unable to contribute to retirement savings while peers in the labor workforce forge ahead. Add to that living in a particular geo-political context (remember trying to navigate graduate school at the beginning of 2020?)! I say all of this to emphasize that… […]