Rebecca Thornton

“In my second year, I was devastated when I found out I had failed both of my preliminary exams … When I went to Professor Thornton's office to tell her, she looked me in the eye and said, ‘This changes nothing about the way I view you as a student or your research capacity.’ She then wrote out for me a ‘game plan’ of how to tackle this setback … a plan for how to gain back my confidence, and met with me regularly to check on how my second first-year was going. Almost exactly one year later, I proudly went to her office and told her that I had just found out that I had passed all of my qualifying exams.”