To add, during my time as a Navigator, I had the opportunity to work on data analysis for both the retrospective and prospective CTN studies. With the guidance of Dr. Hamm and working closely with Ronda Abdel-Nabi- another Navigator, we were successfully able to present our findings at regional, national, and international conferences.
After completing these conferences, we were given the opportunity to work on a manuscript involving the findings we had presented. This was an amazing opportunity for novel researchers, and we were determined to create a successful manuscript. After a couple of weeks, we had completed the first draft of the manuscript. After multiple edits from Dr. Hamm, Dr. Megan Delisle and the team statistician, we were ready to submit the manuscript to a journal. Unfortunately, our submission was rejected, and I was very discouraged by the results. With words of encouragement from Dr. Hamm, we began utilizing the comments provided to us by the first journal to strengthen our paper and address all concerns identified.
After completing all the new edits, we were ready to submit the manuscript to a new paper. After months of edits, we were excited to finally submit the manuscript again with high hopes of success. However, the journal we submitted the paper made the decision of not going forward with our manuscript at the time. Learning from the previous paper submission, I was not deterred at all, and we were ready to face the comments provided by this new journal submission. We quickly began completing edits as needed, worked on updating our data set with the most up-to-date statistics we had available with the statistician on the team.
A few weeks later, we completed all necessary edits and were ready to submit our paper once again. This time, we submitted the paper to The Current Oncology journal. That is when we were successful with our paper submission. The entire team was overjoyed from this milestone achieved and all the hard work that was placed into completing this paper.
This journey has taught me the importance of perseverance and to continuously work towards reaching a goal, regardless of the amount of experience one thinks is required to achieve said goal.