As 2011 draws to a close, I've been thinking about how I got here, as a grad student working in science. I hear a lot of stories about how various people were interested in science at an early age, how they chose their college major and their current career. It seemed like for those people, everything had been planned out early on, when in reality, the road leading up to a chosen profession is a rather twisted one, with a couple lucky accidents along the way.
I was pushed toward math and engineering at a young age, and frankly, I didn't enjoy it. I particularly detested the plastic Erector sets my dad bought me, which were supposed to become helicopters and tanks if you followed directions and built them correctly (which I usually didn't do). I would have much rather gone to dance class and played with dolls instead of building Lego models, and my dad knew it, so as a compromise, I got to build a Lego model of a dollhouse. Beyond memorizing dinosaur names, I had limited exposure to science in grade school, and it wasn't until third grade when I got my first official science lesson on ear anatomy, where we touched on how sound is conducted through the inner ear and the information relayed to the brain. I thought the lesson was interesting, but didn't have much motivation to learn more. Besides, that memory was diluted out later with other science lessons, like taking apart owl pellets and assembling basic circuit boards. The best memory from grade school science lessons was the time where some wildlife expert came to our class and brought an assortment of animals for us to learn about. His menagerie included a chinchilla, a python (which some students wore around their neck, then promptly got very red in the face because the animal was so heavy), and a Komodo dragon. We also had a guinea pig and a tarantula as class pets, which were fun to observe, and I think that really got me interested in animal life, even though my exposure at that age consisted of cleaning the guinea pig cage.
I hardly learned anything in middle school science either, and the part I did remember involved dissecting that earthworm right before lunch in 6th grade, then immediately forgetting why we had to do that. We raised monarch butterflies in class, and watched many nature documentaries, which I thoroughly enjoyed. However, after 6th grade, my parents must have thought that I wasn't learning enough of what they considered important (read: science, math, engineering), because they got me a book called "1000 Science Questions and Answers...With Illustrations!" and told me to read it cover to cover, which I think I did, but only remember the section on animals. This book was followed by The Handy Science Answer Book, which I got for Christmas one year when I was in late middle school, and was also required to read cover to cover. The animal life section in these two books focused mostly on behavior instead of physiology, so everything I gleaned from those tomes fell under ecology (i.e. food chain), unaware of the existence of other fields like physiology, development, and genetics, all of which I'm doing now.
In high school, I told my guidance counselor that I wanted to go to med school, but in retrospect, I was making that up because I didn't have a clue as to what that entailed, and didn't have much exposure to what else was out there (aside from engineering, but my dad is an engineer and I was under the impression that it was all about cars, which I found dull). The counselor suggested that I take AP biology, which was the first lucky accident, because I loved everything about it...so much that I decided to major in it in college. The AP class gave me a wide range of interests, and I chose plain "Biology" over Cellular/Molecular and Ecology/Evolution because it gave me freedom to take any bio class that sounded interesting and still have it count toward the degree. Most of my classes fell under the Ecology/Evolution category, although if I knew then what I know now, I would have changed my major to the cellular/molecular side.
The second lucky accident happened junior year of college, when I took developmental biology (which was awesome) and its corresponding lab class (which was even more so). My GSI for the lab class, who was also one of my current advisor's former students, asked if I had considered going to grad school because I had noted my interest in animal development. And here I am.
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My interests have changed even in grad school; on my application, I listed stem cells as one of my interests, but throughout my rotations I found out that I'd much rather be dealing with animals than growing cells in a dish. I never would have guessed that what I'm working on now would consist of animal development, genetics, physiology, and evolution, given that my early interests were something so far removed from it. I think I owe it to my AP teacher and my GSI, because otherwise I'm not sure I would have found something that I loved so much to study it for 8 years... and counting.
