Hello! My name is Geet and I am a part of the Fred Hutchinson Virtual Explorations in Cancer Research Program. I had so much fun even though it was virtual and learned so much throughout our discussions and all of the activities. Despite the fact that I loved everything, the highlight of this program was definitely Alicia Morales talk. Her talk was so intriguing and I learned so many new things, my favorite part was learning about the imposter syndrome because some of the things she told us about I started to personally relate to and understand how to deal with. I also learned from this talk that a lot of people suffer from this and I’m not the only one who has self-doubts and things like this. It was nice to know that as I always believed I was the only one who ever encountered things like this. As she’s someone who dealt with this and has been overcoming it she also gave us great advice and it was all just so interesting to me and kept me super engaged. She told us “When we think things over and over, those pathways in the brain get stronger and stronger, to the point where those thoughts are almost automatic. That’s just how our brain works. So, if a person has had impostor phenomena thoughts/feelings for a while, it will take time to break those thought patterns. It’s important not to get discouraged.” This one sentence really had an impact on me as well because I understood that many people go through this in life and sometimes it’s hard to stay positive but you have to stay encouraged and believe in yourself as that's one of the first steps for anyone to deal with this.
I focused on the Fred Hutch News story about the latest on how Covid-19 affects cancer patients. The scientific concept being studied is how different types of cancer, cancer treatments and patients in remission get affected differently by Covid-19 and they are trying to see if it’s easier for them to get the Coronavirus. The goal of this study is to understand how Covid-19 differently affects patients with cancer and they are really trying to understand if they can prevent these patients getting the virus and lower the deaths of cancer patients who get Covid-19. This study is very important because researchers have already found that “Cancer patients with COVID-19 die at three times the rate of non-cancer patients with the disease, according to findings just released by the COVID-19 & Cancer Consortium'' this shows us that its super important as researchers are trying to do multiple different clinical trials and trying new therapies so that cancer patients aren’t as affected and the death rate of cancer patients decreases if they are diagnosed with Covid-19. I chose to research this study because I wanted to learn more about how people who already have a previous condition are affected by this virus and how much it affects them more than a person who doesn’t have any underlining conditions. We still don’t know so much about Covid-19 and have so much more to learn about it. I was interested to see how much of a difference having previous conditions can affect a certain person. As stated above the death rate is 3 times as more so seeing that they are doing things to research about why was also cool and it was good to see that multiple people and groups are doing things to work on this study.
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