Academic Perseverance Quotes

I didn't abandon my studies. Because I was, through no - clarify this. Through no particular genius of my own, I was the first person from Libertyville Public High School to attend Harvard, not because I was smarter than anyone or better than anyone, but no one had ever applied before. It was like University of Illinois, a fine institution, was the sort of the upper echelon of places where kids went from that school. And so I felt sort of a duty to myself and my peers to continue with those studies, and to continue to, intellectually arm myself for my coming struggles.

I personally don't like school, but you have to do it if you want to get through life, so pretty much I put up with it.

Math was a two-part exam and I once didn't go for the second part. I knew I'd done so badly on the first it was hopeless. I re-took it about four or five times. I think I eventually got it by getting the top GCSE grade.

I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.

I was always good at gym! Gym classes were good, but school really wasn't my thing, but I did it, got through it. It's definitely important.

I graduated in biology by overcoming an incredibly impossible science workload in college. The knowledge does nothing for me, but knowing I achieved that makes me feel like I can achieve anything because those science classes in biology are just impossible.

When I was in year nine at school I was told I'd get no GCSEs by teachers who didn't believe in me - but I ended up leaving with 13 A*s to Cs so I'm pretty proud of that.

The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be

Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.

I realized that a lot of people in my family had sacrificed for me to have the opportunity to go to a place like Duke. I owed it to them to finish. I graduated with a 3.6.

To preserve one's mind intact through a modern college education is a test of courage and endurance, but the battle is worth it and the stakes are the highest possible to man: the survival of reason.

School was very important to me, and music was what kept me coming back.

Everyone engaged in research must have had the experience of working with feverish and prolonged intensity to write a paper which no one else will read or to solve a problem which no one else thinks important and which will bring no conceivable reward - which may only confirm a general opinion that the researcher is wasting his time on irrelevancies.

Advice to first year medical students: In anatomy, it is better to have learned and lost than never to have learned at all.

Most people go to college to get a job, and here I am sitting in class with a job, making exponentially more than whoever's teaching me, you know what I'm saying? At the end of the day, I wanted to finish what I started, and make my mom proud. A lot of people put a lot of hard work and investment to allow me to go to school, and for me not to finish would have been like a slap in the face to my family and those people.

Today I still feel like the most illiterate person ever to have roamed the campuses of Wellesley and Harvard, where I later transferred. I remain intimidated by all the books I haven't read, but over the years I've come to realize that being a student is a lifelong adventure.

I didn't go to school three years for nothing. It was something that was understood. Even though I went to play baseball, one day I would come back and get my degree.

From age 16 on, I found school boring and failed A-level Physics at my first attempt. This was necessary for university entrance, and so I stayed an extra year to repeat it. This time, I did splendidly and was admitted to Sheffield University, my first choice because of their excellent Chemistry Department.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.

In junior high school, I learned that I could be good at school. I remember liking the freedom to choose classes and the pleasure of learning and doing well. My perseverance and love of reading had somehow allowed me to overcome many disadvantages of dyslexia, and I read a lot of books for pleasure.

So in my sophomore year, I took a senior anatomy class. I thought anatomy - being the thing that I should be most interested in - and if I could hack, as we called it, a senior class, I would continue. I didn't hack the senior class.

The greatest finish line for me was finishing college - it was a pact I made with my mother, during a time when she fell ill. That happened during my Freshman year, and unfortunately she never saw me compete in the Olympics. But she really wanted me to finish college, because she never finished Junior High.

I was a D student in high school and on the dean's list in college.