Victoria (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} carapace_green) wrote,@ 2006-10-06 15:58:00 |
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Since some people have asked, here's the unbelievably long but true story of
At age 15, I went from a laughably bad rural high school straight into an early college program. I planned to major in life science. But before college, I'd never been around people who were making a serious study of film, painting, literary avant-gardes, and the like. English, where I came from, was about the diagramming of sentences and the construction of wretched, five-paragraph essays. Real humanities academia proved intoxicating, so in I dove.
But once I was truly separated from science, once my math skills had deteriorated and once my old science fair friends from high school started doing coursework that I couldn't understand, I started to feel like I'd been expelled from the garden.
And the feeling persisted. By the time I graduated, my focii in art history were museum studies, especially as it related to natural history collections, and the female surrealists, several of whom were profoundly inspired by natural history. I was also interested in taxonomy as a critical practice. In other words, I was reaching back toward life science. At 20, when I was on the point of graduating, I knew that turning my back on science had been a misstep, but my feeling of having Fallen was so thorough that I couldn't even contemplate going back and picking it up again. For better or for worse, my B.A. was in art history.
A few years later, on my first day of law school, the Dean gave a speech to the 1Ls about why we'd decided to become attorneys. Having, for my own part, absolutely no idea, I was anxious to hear what he had to say. The Dean talked about public service, which was nice, and writing, which was nice, but then he said "Of course, if you could do math, you wouldn't be here!" The other 1Ls laughed, but suddenly I wanted to bite someone. I didn't stop wanting to bite someone for the next two and a half years.
About three years after law school, when my spouse and I had decided that my practicing law was going to drive both of us insane, I started exploring other options. Among these was teaching. I looked at the regs for my state and determined that, in terms of pay, job market, and amount of retraining necessary, high school biology was the sweet spot. To learn more, I took a nonmajors' bio class and a class in teaching praxis. Studying biology made me insanely happy. The secondary students, eh, not so much. Then things with my husband's career and with my fiction started to pick up, and the question of what I was going to be when I grew up got deferred. I got very lucky in terms of finding interesting non-lawyer jobs in law firms, and I worked on fiction, and things were pretty okay.
Then I got the chance to take off from work for a few months and work exclusively on fiction. Being a full-time writer was alright, but when I got right down to it, it wasn't enough. I still love writing and literature and the like, but I need something more.
Thus biology. When I started taking classes again, it was an experiment. Thus far, the experiment has been wildly successful. I love learning about natural systems. I love thinking about experiment design. At the moment, with my limited exposure to the various sub-disciples, I would have to say that mycology is my primary interest, but I feel very much like that could change. Evo-devo fascinates me, as does biophysics. I can see myself being an ethologist (and starving.) I can see myself focusing in cell biology. I've also been reading a lot about the Tree of Life project, and even though I can't, at this point, say that I know ssuRNA from my armpit, I'm finding it fascinating as well.
I am very sure, at this point, that life science is the right path for me, but I'm less sure about the specifics. I want to go back to school as an undergraduate for the breadth of classes I'll be able to take. I also want to do it for the research experience. A secondary benefit of getting a B.S. is that I would become elligible to take the patent bar, which could help me earn money while I'm in grad school.
So that's it.
At age 15, I went from a laughably bad rural high school straight into an early college program. I planned to major in life science. But before college, I'd never been around people who were making a serious study of film, painting, literary avant-gardes, and the like. English, where I came from, was about the diagramming of sentences and the construction of wretched, five-paragraph essays. Real humanities academia proved intoxicating, so in I dove.
But once I was truly separated from science, once my math skills had deteriorated and once my old science fair friends from high school started doing coursework that I couldn't understand, I started to feel like I'd been expelled from the garden.
And the feeling persisted. By the time I graduated, my focii in art history were museum studies, especially as it related to natural history collections, and the female surrealists, several of whom were profoundly inspired by natural history. I was also interested in taxonomy as a critical practice. In other words, I was reaching back toward life science. At 20, when I was on the point of graduating, I knew that turning my back on science had been a misstep, but my feeling of having Fallen was so thorough that I couldn't even contemplate going back and picking it up again. For better or for worse, my B.A. was in art history.
A few years later, on my first day of law school, the Dean gave a speech to the 1Ls about why we'd decided to become attorneys. Having, for my own part, absolutely no idea, I was anxious to hear what he had to say. The Dean talked about public service, which was nice, and writing, which was nice, but then he said "Of course, if you could do math, you wouldn't be here!" The other 1Ls laughed, but suddenly I wanted to bite someone. I didn't stop wanting to bite someone for the next two and a half years.
About three years after law school, when my spouse and I had decided that my practicing law was going to drive both of us insane, I started exploring other options. Among these was teaching. I looked at the regs for my state and determined that, in terms of pay, job market, and amount of retraining necessary, high school biology was the sweet spot. To learn more, I took a nonmajors' bio class and a class in teaching praxis. Studying biology made me insanely happy. The secondary students, eh, not so much. Then things with my husband's career and with my fiction started to pick up, and the question of what I was going to be when I grew up got deferred. I got very lucky in terms of finding interesting non-lawyer jobs in law firms, and I worked on fiction, and things were pretty okay.
Then I got the chance to take off from work for a few months and work exclusively on fiction. Being a full-time writer was alright, but when I got right down to it, it wasn't enough. I still love writing and literature and the like, but I need something more.
Thus biology. When I started taking classes again, it was an experiment. Thus far, the experiment has been wildly successful. I love learning about natural systems. I love thinking about experiment design. At the moment, with my limited exposure to the various sub-disciples, I would have to say that mycology is my primary interest, but I feel very much like that could change. Evo-devo fascinates me, as does biophysics. I can see myself being an ethologist (and starving.) I can see myself focusing in cell biology. I've also been reading a lot about the Tree of Life project, and even though I can't, at this point, say that I know ssuRNA from my armpit, I'm finding it fascinating as well.
I am very sure, at this point, that life science is the right path for me, but I'm less sure about the specifics. I want to go back to school as an undergraduate for the breadth of classes I'll be able to take. I also want to do it for the research experience. A secondary benefit of getting a B.S. is that I would become elligible to take the patent bar, which could help me earn money while I'm in grad school.
So that's it.
