Although it's a fact buried in the depths of history, as a grad student I led the creation of the ACL Student Sessions, which began as an experiment at ACL 1991 at Berkeley and evolved into today's Student Research Workshops at multiple *ACL conferences. I've evolved too, since then, or at least I'd like to think so. In this talk I'm going to offer some hopefully-useful reflections on the state of our field, especially for newly budding researchers, and share some time-tested advice for school and beyond.