My Professional Journey... So Far!

When I started this blog I wanted the purpose to be to spread exciting science to others; I didn't want it to be a place for me to talk about myself exclusively. However, I realized that this page deserves a bit more background about what I do and where I'm hoping to go, because I've contributed to that pool of exciting science! As a result, I'm here to tell you a little bit about my professional journey and share some tips and my story with the hopes that a young career academic a few years behind me will see this and realize that academia is a tough place to be, but it is one of the most rewarding journeys you can put yourself on and there is nowhere else I'd rather be. 

Like so many others in this field, I have always been a victim of imposter syndrome and had difficulty talking about my own research in a proud and confident way to colleagues. Maybe I'll talk more about imposter syndrome in a future post, but it is a serious psychological affliction that many of us in academia struggle with. I've found that I feel a bit better and more confident after practicing those communication skills. I have a lot of passion and infectious excitement (in my not so humble opinion) about what I do, so hyping myself up and talking about it helps a lot. In addition, I think it is always a great idea to practice your "elevator pitch" or explaining what your research is to others. It becomes second nature after awhile, but if you're still early in your career like me, you can never practice selling yourself, your research, and your experiences enough! 

I've mentioned a few times now that I've always wanted to be a scientist. I read books constantly as a kid, and most of them were geared towards animals, nature, and scientific phenomena. When I finally got to college, fresh out of high school and high on my new found independence, I never really questioned what my major would be; it felt written in the stars that I would be a biologist. I went to a small-ish liberal arts college, so we had a relatively small science program and biology department. I decided (easily) to major in Organismal Biology and minored in Psychology, because it was always another subject that interested me and I figured I could apply it to animal behavior in the future if I wanted to. 

Graduate school was in my sights from day one of my Bachelor's degree. I've always been a big planner and I knew I had big goals that required commitment, dedication, and time. As a result, I started thinking about what I was interested in during my first semester freshman year and tried to get to know many of my professors. Fish biologists were plentiful in my department, because my school is extremely close to the Chesapeake Bay. No hate to my ichthyologists, but fish weren't speaking to me, so I started to explore what my other options were. By my second semester freshman year, I was in the second course of our introductory biology curriculum. The topic of the course is a broad look at the principles of evolution and ecology and, of course, I fell in love. I felt the passion in my professor and it translated to me seamlessly. As a result, I set out to find an evolutionary biologist in my department that studied something besides aquatics. Lucky for me, I found one, and I sent him an email about halfway through the semester asking about research assistant opportunities in his lab and we quickly built an irreplaceable relationship. I worked under this professor on the ecology and evolution of reptiles and amphibians for the remainder of my undergraduate career, and I can safely say that sending that single email was the best decision I've ever made. 

Soon after I sent that email, I was on board as a research assistant. I helped with some local projects that Spring to get my feet wet and induct me into the lab. However, the majority of his field work was in the American southwest, so I started prepping for my first field expedition: 6 weeks of hard work in Arizona with no cell reception, just enough internet to check your email (on a good day), and an hour's drive to the nearest city. The anticipation leading up to this first trip was like none I had experienced; I was excited to explore a place I had never been, nervous about making a good impression and kicking off my academic career, grateful that I was given the opportunity, a bit sad about leaving my family and friends for that long, and so many other things! However, once I landed in Tucson, all those fears and reservations flew out the window and the next 6 weeks flew by in a haze of good times, new friends, and a wealth of knowledge. I learned things I never thought I would about life, the research world, the desert southwest, and most of all, lizards! 

The first few weeks of that first summer were spent absorbing as much information as I could. I kept a notebook and filled pages upon pages everyday with facts, tips, questions, topics of interest, and so much more. To me, this is truly the mark of a career scientist: observing, absorbing, keeping notes, asking constant questions, annotating, reading. Those feelings of curiosity and desire for exploration are what keep you in love with the job. An interest in science is obviously important, but I think it is the wanderlust souls and curious minded that truly make the best scientists. After a few weeks, my advisor had helped me develop, implement, and carry out a project of my own investigating how behavior was influenced by polymorphism within a species of lizard. After our field season in AZ came to a close, we worked hard on organizing and analyzing the data from that project and wrote it up into a manuscript that was eventually published! This post is already way longer than I intended, so I'll go into specifics of my actual research in a later post, but I'll include a link to my publications below if you're interested. 

That next school year was the most effective preparation for grad school I have ever experienced. I was a sophomore, still figuring out life on my own at 19 and how to navigate college, but that year was a whirlwind! When I wasn't writing that first project into a paper or working on homework for my classes, my advisor and I worked hard on planning our field season for the next summer. I spent that year studying, analyzing, writing, revising, editing, planning, applying for grant funding, trying to figure out biostatistics, mapping out field sites, applying for permits, and, oh yeah, going to class! It was overwhelming at times, but the support I had from my mentor made a huge difference and I can honestly say I was living my best life, as the kids say. Looking forward, I knew this field season was going to be different: I was becoming more and more familiar with the research process and was taking the lead on my next project. I planned to be in AZ for 8 weeks this time doing a mark-recapture study on natural selection in lizards. 

After that second summer, we worked hard to write that project up into another paper and it (finally) got published the year I started graduate school. That project really showed me the rough and tumble side of academia; there were days I felt my project was failing, I was worried my analysis would come up non-significant (and thus negate all of the hard work I had done in the field), drawing conclusions and taking a lead on writing is hard, and we got rejected from half a dozen journals before it was finally accepted. Even though there were a lot of days I felt like quitting during this project, I felt like I was getting an even more realistic taste of life in academia, so it fired me up more than anything. We spent about a year writing and analyzing to turn this project into a manuscript for submission. 

After the writing was done and we were just working on getting accepted for publication, my undergraduate career was almost over. That spring I went on a study abroad trip to South America to broaden my horizons and the following fall I completed a small independent project identifying, pinning, and curating insects for my Entomology professor. At this point, I had learned a lot about reptiles and obviously fallen in love. However, before I pulled the trigger on graduate school and locked myself into the herpetology world for life, I wanted to spread out and explore different biological interests. I had always been interested in entomology and paleontology in addition to herpetology, so that small project my senior year was very exciting. By that time, however, I had decided to pursue a Master's in paleontology. 

By the end of my undergraduate career, I completed 3 independent projects, gave 2 poster presentations and 1 oral presentation, attended 1 professional conference, and received 3 monetary grants to conduct research. I couldn't have done any of it without the support of my family and my amazing mentor. When I graduated, I couldn't wait to see how far I would be able to go if I accomplished all that as an undergrad. 

Right after I finished my Bachelor's I started my Master's degree. I had one semester off in between because I graduated in December and my Master's program started in August, but it still wasn't a lot of time. I chose to attend a large research institution with a world-renowned natural history museum that was about 1,000 miles from where I grew up and lived my whole life. I also decided to study something totally different: invertebrate paleontology. I had an amazing and ultra supportive advisor that was tenured and 20+ years into his career. It was a very different dynamic than my last advisor, but it still worked. My project focused on the biogeography of an extinct group of cephalopods during the Cretaceous period. It was extremely fascinating, but I was disappointed by how much computer work I had to do and how little field work I was able to do. I also struggled severely with homesickness; it was my first time so far from home and the first time 100% on my own and paying all my bills, not to mention that my significant other and I were long distance while he traveled extensively for work on the east coast and I studied in the Midwest. The combination of those things made my Master's a lot harder for me than others. I'm also extremely introverted, so making friends and forcing myself to go out and socialize was an added challenge. 

At the end of my first year of my Master's, I decided to try to graduate a little early and do the non-thesis Master's option. I was feeling pretty defeated and I wasn't sure I wanted to stay in academia at that point. I'm proud of myself for finishing and getting that degree, but I'm disappointed in myself for not making the most of it. Looking back, there are things I would do differently. Namely, I would be more vocal with my advisor about what I wanted out of my project. I would also push myself outside of my comfort zone more and make more friends; I think if I had that support system I would have had a much easier time. While hindsight is always 20/20, I made the decisions I did. After I graduated, my partner and I moved to Richmond, VA. Our plans were changed for us time and time again as a result of his job and we ended up in a city we hadn't planned on. Now that we are here, we really enjoy it. When we first moved to Richmond, right after I graduated, I was exploring the environmental sector and worked for an environmental cleanup company. That job was far from ideal and oversold to me by the management, so I left after about 6 months to teach high school biology. I wanted to explore K12 teaching to see if it was something I wanted to pursue long-term. Long story short, it's not. These last 6 months as a teacher have reminded me what I love about teaching and what I don't love about being in "the real world" as I call it (I mean not in academia of course). I've found that passion for research in myself again and I'm currently researching potential PhD programs to apply to this Fall. This year we endured a pandemic and I did a lot of reflection about what I want out of life and my career. I realized that that defeat and disappointment in myself that I felt during my Master's was not because I can't handle academia. I realized the things that are most important to me in my career and decided to come back to academia soon. 

The moral of this story is that academia is hard. It makes you question yourself a lot and there are days you feel you're failing. Your success and your happiness depend a lot on the support you have and the people you have in your corner. A great advisor can help you achieve great things, while an advisor you don't quite click with can impede your journey significantly. My biggest piece of advice is to trust yourself and the process. Don't rush anything and DON'T compare yourself to the journey of others around you. If you need time off, take time off to think, but trust your gut and don't give up when it gets hard. There are a lot of days it will get hard, but the connections you make and the reward of doing exactly what you love every single day makes it more than worth it. 

Thanks again for reading this ~ extra long~ autobiography (very sorry); enjoy some photos from various points on my journey. Stay tuned soon for my tips on getting into graduate school and navigating academia. If you want to share your journey in academia, send me a message or a comment. Until then, stay curious!