Congrats, fam. You’re doing it.

Amid a hurricane of turmoil, you’re not stopping.

You haven’t been scared off yet, as the U.S. is in its most vulnerable position since the Cuban Missile Crisis. You haven’t jumped ship yet to another country — perhaps your home country, or one where you have family, or one that will give you a free college education.

You haven’t been disheartened by the unsure promise of a good future, or even any kind of future at all. North Korea, Russia, the KKK or Antifa haven’t made you descend to your bomb shelter, be it a decked out $2 million apartment or a basement from home built the last time the country feared nuclear annihilation.

Either way, you’re ready to, as some of the older professors on campus might remember, “duck and cover.”

You haven’t been intimidated by the increase of the word hate, and all it’s twisted permutations by differing groups of humans, lobbied at other groups of humans. Undocumented, disenfranchised and/or marginalized.

You haven’t gotten so tired of “fake news” comments on Facebook or seeing the word “cuck” in writing that you unplugged and lived in the wilderness Bear Grylls style.

You haven’t been lured off by the promise of a low-paying full-time job. After all, it is tempting. Easier to pay rent than it is to pay tuition and rent at the same time.

You’re here.

You have continued, despite these reasons and more, to continue getting an education, improving not only yourself, but potentially the lives of others around you somewhere down the road.

All with no proof that we’ll have functioning roads when you walk across that stage, or get the real diploma in the mail soon after.

It takes a certain courage to get up every single day. And this isn’t political; all things listed above should concern any reasonable adult.

So maybe someone reading this isn’t a student. Maybe you never were, or were but didn’t finish. Something got in the way; money, obligation, time. Or maybe it was, as many have felt for almost a full year now, a sense of dread.

For those of you, for any reason, thinking about giving up — Don’t.

Don’t give up.

The world needs more bright, trained and integrated minds, now more than ever. College, more than anything, will bring you into contact with people and ideas that you might never have had you stayed home. It will teach you how to think, not like others, but like yourself. And express what you think, and decide what you think.

If more of us can think for ourselves, more of us can take an active role in making the world a better place. The next generation (millennials, but with a z maybe?) deserves a chance.