The Love of My Life

I fell in love this semester. Deeply, head over heels, in love. From fuzzy-headed morning to late into the night, I spend all my time exihilerated, and challenged by this romance. I know that for most people, such an intimate connection would be kept exclusive, but I can't help it. I want everyone to love

Biology.

As a child, I knew what I wanted to be. Always. You ask me when I was four, I'd say “marine biologist.” You ask me when I was ten, I'd say “Marine biologist. Or maybe a seismologist.” Thirteen, fourteen? “marine biologist, or virology would be totally cool too. But all the good stuff's being done by the government, and I don't trust them.” A passion for learning has been in my blood since the beginning. A childhood nurtured with National Geographic and frequent trips to the Aquarium fostered that passion.

But life got in the way. I didn't drive off to British Columbia when I graduated high school, fully prepared to rescue baby killer whales with my 4X4, Free Willy style. I didn't even graduate. Instead, I cared for my dying mother, and then spent the next 8 years or so trying to pick up the pieces.

I went back to school. Got bogged down in math, which has always been my nemesis. Decided that I could love biology from afar, admire it as a layperson, and switched to major in creative writing instead. No more likely to make me a living wage, but something I could, with some effort, be good at. It was, and I hope I can say this without sounding egotistical, safe.

Something was missing though. I would watch Youtube videos of deep sea creatures, and harangue Kenny for as long as he'd listen about what we know-and how much we don't know. And he'd look at me and say “you light up when you talk about this. Why aren't you studying biology?”

It was scary. Math was scary. Even scarier though was the prospect of succeeding, and then realizing that I had been wrong. When so much of your self-identification is based on this label-Marine Biologist In the Making-what happens if you find out you don't like it? Far safer to write. Teach writing. Watch video of ROVs descending the Monterey Canyon and sigh quietly. It was way too scary to think about attempting.

I did it anyway. This fall I enrolled in Calculus, Chemistry, and Biology 22. Three of the core classes I'll need when I transfer (all fingers crossed) to UCSC next fall, with a marine biology major.

Calculus was hard. Though I'd enjoyed pre-calc, (math! For the first time in my life!) and felt good going in, it was a slog all the way through. Chemistry I felt solid in. I'd taken chemistry before and had a good handle on it. It was a lot of work, no doubt, but I didn't feel any different coming out than I did going in.

Biology on the other hand. Well, biology changed everything. Bio 22 is, as our instructors made clear on the first day, a majors bio class. That means that everyone in the room, for one reason or another, was a biology major. It was (for the most part) like coming home to a family I didn't know I had. I fit (again, for the most part). I learned, and questioned, and absorbed more knowledge than I'd ever had access to before. My curiosity was piqued more times, and on more diverse subjects, than ever before. It became a joke among my friends in the class that whatever we were learning that week would surely be what I wanted to do research on later. Of course deep sea jellies! Of course dinoflagellates!

I'd always been a big predator kind of girl. But every week there was a new question, a new vein of inquiry that I wanted to follow. From evolution to plants to invertebrates, it all fascinated me. And every piece that I learned made me see the world in a clearer way. This is the only way I've been able to describe it:

Imagine you're looking at the muddy bank of a river. All you can see is the water, some trees on the far shore, and the mud at your feet. That's all that's there for your eyes to focus on. But beneath that, there are predator/prey interactions. There are all kinds of different plants among those trees, with wildly different heritages and abilities. There are microscopic organisms floating in the water. There are sediments being carried by the water that tell a story we can't see.

And each of those elements: the predators, the prey, the plants and the sediment; they all tantalize me with questions.

It was good to be around people who understood. After all, that's why most of us were in the class: we have questions. But being curious doesn't make someone a scientist. It's just a really good place to start. I still wondered if I really wanted to do Science, or if I just wanted to sit in a classroom all day hearing someone talk about amazing things. There's only one way to know for sure.

For the last two weeks of the class, we designed our own experiments, based what we'd learned this semester, and what interested us. We wrote a hypothesis. The hypothesis was tested with tools we'd learned how to use this semester. We looked at our data and formed conclusions. Then each group presented their findings to the class. When I write it out like this, it sounds silly. 8^th graders do science projects. But it wasn't silly.

My friends and I were curious about the biodiversity of a man-made substrate versus biodiversity of the naturally occurring rock. It turned out our hypothesis was correct, and the biodiversity of the man-made substrate was significantly lower. That was-to me at least-utterly irrelevant. The process of questioning, hypothesizing, and designing an experiment was far more valuable. I waded out to do a count on the wall at Lover's Point (and got dunked in the process), then came back and entered our numbers into a couple different biodiversity calculators. I took the raw numbers that we had scribbled in our damp notebooks, and made them tell me things. The things they told me weren't earth-shattering by any means, but they provoked more lines of inquiry. Each question leads to another...

After each group had presented their study, our instructor congratulated us on having done Science. I wish I could remember his exact words. It was something to the effect of “many of you have wanted to be scientists, but your understanding of what that means comes from nature shows. This is what science is.”

Those words sank into me like a warm drop of truth right through my breastbone. I'd been wondering myself if I truly wanted to be a scientist, or if I wanted to be the star of my own exciting nature program. Now I know.

I want to be a scientist.

Our experiment wasn't glamorous. It wasn't exciting, except when I fell in. And it wasn't particularly thrilling when I pulled together the numbers and started to draw conclusions. It just felt right. It felt like loving someone: good, and so natural you don't notice right away, even though the whole world is changed. The 'aha' moment didn't come until after he made that comment.

This is what I want to do. Over and over. Every day.

I don't want a nature show. I want to ask questions, and get answers. I want to go out, get data, and make it tell me things.

So that's the story of how I fell in love over fall semester. I can't wait for Bio 21 in the spring!