Saturday, November 30, 2013

So Here Goes...

Sometimes it's hard to grapple with how enormous the world is. At least that's what I've discovered in the past few months. Maybe I'm just finding it hard to grapple with the fact that I went from a community of 100 curious high school students to a community of 15,000 ambitious undergrads; to put it in the most cliché terms possible, I've become a little fish in a big pond instead of a big fish in a little pond. And I find it hard to believe that I can't accept all available opportunities--that I can't enroll in an interesting-sounding class that reached capacity exactly ten minutes after registration began and that I can't attend a lecture on the Higgs-Boson because I have a lab report due the next day.

To put this in a larger, more consequential context, I'm finding it hard to handle the fact every day, people are making enormous scientific discoveries at the same time as people are dying in natural disasters while some people are watching reruns of Gossip Girl and other people are staying up until four in the morning solving a math problem they'll probably go over in class the next day. I don't know why I didn't notice this before, since it's always been the case.

High school gave me a chance to explore what I wanted to do with my life. I've always loved writing, and my Environmental Biology course helped me discover that science writing was a great path for me. But now comes the real-life part: I have to go out and do it. I have to accept the fact that there's no real break between now and the rest of my life. I actually have to read the news if I want to write about it, since it changes every single day*. I have to reach out to professors that intimidate me and I have to practice writing science articles and I have to put together schedules. And most of all, I have to believe that this is all going to come together into a future I can thrive in.

*Believe it or not, this is not something I really understood before my Interpreting the Days News class this semester.