In whom do you have faith?

Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer … from a teenager

Then reality took hold, and over the course of a month, I got 199 rejections out of those 200 emails. One professor even went through my entire procedure, painstakingly — I’m not really sure where he got all this time — and he went through and said why each and every step was like the worst mistake I could ever make. Clearly, the professors did not have as high of an opinion of my work as I did.

However, there is a silver lining. One professor said, “Maybe I might be able to help you, kid.” So, I went in that direction.

Theories can be shared, and you don’t have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. It’s a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender — it doesn’t matter. It’s just your ideas that count. For me, it’s all about looking at the Internet in an entirely new way, to realize that there’s so much more to it than just posting duck-face pictures of yourself online.

You could be changing the world.

So if a 15 year-old who didn’t even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer — just imagine what you could do.

We gotta have faith.