You always hear people say things like: “ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a doctor or a surfer or a model”. For me, it’s more like “ever since last summer I knew I wanted to be a botanist.” I used to be a lot like those people that thought they had it all figured out at the age of 6. I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian and move to a rural area where I could work on farm animals and own my own horses and cows. That has all completely changed now with learning how hard it’s become to survive in the real world on your own, let alone with multiple large animals to care for. I think for me, and probably for many other students, having to go through my last year of high school and my first year of college in a pandemic was a bit challenging. It made me question if what I had signed up for with going to college and choosing this career path in biology was really what I wanted to do. Up until this summer before junior year, I just told myself that I would wait until I graduated to figure out what I really wanted to dedicate my life to. It truly doesn’t seem like such a great plan now that I think about it, but in that time, it was all that I had really.

Over the summer, I realized that since I didn’t want a job that involved being on your feet 24/7 and I didn’t want one where you were sitting at a desk for nine hours straight, so becoming a scientist sounded like a pretty good solution. The internship that I was a part of took place at my home university, ODU. It was an 8 weeklong program where I was compensated for coming up with new ideas of things to research, going out into the field and collecting data, and collaborating with my peers and my mentors on certain research topics. It was one of the best academic experiences I’ve had. I believe that my previous experiences dabbling in other career paths helped me to really solidify my desire to be a part of this community. Some of those experiences I’ve had in the past include playing violin for my school, helping as an art instructor, working at my local animal shelter, working in retail, and working in a recreational center where I spent most of my time helping the elderly guests there get around. I think I enjoyed all those activities equally, but none of them seemed to really call my name.

I feel like it is important to enter the job hunt with some previous experience. Some of the experience I already have includes traveling to Barrow, Alaska in 2022 with Dr. Victoria hill to help her study photosynthesis in the sea ice along the Arctic Circle. Our entire class made the trek there over spring break and after we got back, each of our groups prepared poster boards detailing the work we completed in the field and presented them at the spring research symposium at ODU. I am currently still participating in research and gaining valuable skills in the field that I would like to be a part of soon. Some of these skills include work in GIS, R, SPSS, image J, and more. I’ve also gained some physical skills like learning to press and prepare herbarium specimen and setting up experiments on petri plates to germinate orchid seeds. Furthermore, I will be partnering with another student to write a few research grant proposals and hopefully travel to a biology meeting to present our findings.

Finally, I have learned so much about myself in the past year And I have gained so many new valuable experiences. I used to think of myself as uncapable, shy, and more or less of a follower. I now know that I am a strong leader who is responsible, hardworking, caring, and fun to be around. And I know that those are the kind of characteristics that characterize a great member of the team.