When I started college I was pre-vet major. I loved animals and didn’t know what else to do with that interest. Also, it was easy to visualize a career that fell in my sphere of everyday knowledge. After all, we’ve all seen T.V. shows about doctors, lawyers, etc. My problem with the pre-vet coursework was taking the chemistry courses. I always struggled with chemistry and could not understand it down in my bones the way I could get biology.
Here’s something I never thought I would admit publicly. When I was taking Inorganic Chemistry, each exam had an essay question that I usually couldn’t understand very well, so I would write something and stop in the middle of a sentence. Even if I finished the exam ahead of time, I would wait and be one of the last people turning it in. I was hoping that the professor would think I ran out of time and was forced to stop right in the middle of explaining the answer, rather than see that I didn’t know what to say. Looking back, I’m sure I fooled no one. In spite of this, I took the required pre-vet courses without really thinking about what I was doing until I got to Organic II. The course met three times a week for lecture and had two required labs, so I was spending nine hours a week in it and I hated it. All I could think about was if I dropped Organic II, I could use all that time to take two upper-level Biology courses in subjects I loved.
When I finally decided to do that, I had to give up my plan of vet school. It was scary because I didn’t know what else I would do, and flipping around the T.V. channels to see what other careers were featured wasn’t helpful. On the other hand, I can still remember how wonderful it felt to leave Organic and enroll in the Biology courses I wanted. I was still in lab for hours, but it didn’t matter because everything I was learning and doing was so exciting. I think my passion for biology was evident to my professors because one of them asked me to be a peer tutor and I was later hired to teach a lab section. That was when I realized how much I loved teaching, and that I wanted to pursue a career that would allow me to share my joy in biology.
As I began the path that led to a Ph.D., my family was somewhat supportive, but they didn’t really get it. “If you like biology anyway, why don’t you just become a doctor?” was the question I was asked most often. As if the two things were the same! Neither my parents, nor my many aunts, uncles or cousins had attended a four year college, and while my parents were proud of my education, my extended family was stunned that I would willingly subject myself to additional years of schooling after graduation. Of course, they didn’t understand that the “years of schooling” in a Ph.D. program are vastly different from the typical routines of high school and college classwork leading up to graduate school. As a college professor, I feel as though I am living out my dreams, even though they are quite different from the dreams I had when I started college. For me, a difficult experience really did open a new door.
Carolyn Jaslow, Biology