Hello there!

Sorry I've been away, this has been a tough few days. Twenty-one pages of essay and two tests later, it's over and I'm alive.

I'm essentially free for the next week until I have my one and only exam. I can practically feel the stress rolling off of me.

Ahead of me are days of hiking, gardening, climbing, and movies. Freedom is so sweet; even if it is only for a couple weeks.

In my last entry I included melodysheep's Bob Ross Remix. The PBS Icon remixes were originally my first exposure to melodysheep, but my love of their Symphony of Science videos grabbed me. Throughout my past few days of dense studies, I continued to find my attention drifting back to these videos.

I blame the ADHD. Yeah, that should definitely be my catch-phrase.



There is something heart wrenching about the Symphony of Science videos. Not heart wrenching in the sadness sense, but heart wrenching in the feeling they give me when I feel like they've touched something deep inside of me. Is that inspiration? I'm not exactly sure.

I've always been a curious person, I assume that's why I was drawn to journalism. I have a never-ending stream of questions in my head, and the curiosity is never satisfied.

However, the journalism career was very late on my radar. For years, I wanted to go into science.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a veterinarian, and not just your run of the mill veterinarian. I wanted to work in a research hospital. This is likely from growing up in the same town as the massive University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine. I learned how to horseback ride on a farm that also did Lay-Ups (horses that boarded post-hospital stays at the Vet School), so I had a lot of exposure to the Vet School at an early age.

That led to a fascination with genetics. I wanted to know what, at the smallest level, made an animal tick.

However, then I discovered dinosaurs.

My Sophomore year of high school was the year of dinosaurs (and French history, but we're not talking about that right now). I read all the materials I could get my hands on. The most fascinating aspect to me, a girl who raised poultry, was studying my own feathered pets with the knowledge that they were the descendants of the dinosaurs who survived the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

This fell right into my love of genetics, and I became absolutely smitten with Evolutionary Ornithology. My love was fed by my exchange summer in Germany, where there were too many museums, one of which was entirely dedicated to fossils.

Then reality slapped me in the face. 

I was enrolled in a high-paced program in high school  (similar to IB, only British), and the faculty demanded excellence, or you got left behind (a reality that was thrown at me when I expressed my desire to go to community college and was shunned). 

I have never been good at doing homework. My last two semesters of college have been dedicated to actually doing my homework (I am proud to say, I didn't skip a single assignment this semester). This was reflected primarily in my grades in math and chemistry. Due to my lacking grades, my guidance counselor told me I needed to decide on a different dream, because I wasn't going to succeed with this one.

I was aimless for a while, until one day while listening to the This American Life episode "Notes on Camp". It was that day I decided I wanted to be a journalist. I'm content with that, I'm really comfortable with that choice.

Yet, something still nags at me.

A few weeks ago Neil DeGrasse Tyson spoke at my University. The speech sold out before the tickets even went on sale to the public, and I ended up sitting alone in the back of the mezzanine. 

I didn't know much about Dr. Tyson prior to seeing him speak, and I almost didn't attend. However, I'm very glad I did.

Honestly though, the part of his talk that struck me was his criticism of the education system in the United States. Essentially he was emphasizing that the education system trains students to fear science and math. More and mores students choose to opt out of the higher level science and math classes because they are hard. People who may have become our next engineers become English majors because no one took the initiative to tell them that they could do it. Upper level classes in anything is difficult; I sit in fear consistently about the reporting course I have to take in the fall semester because it's a weed-out course. Yet, I don't fear that any more than the calculus 2 course or the organic chemistry course I'll be taking next year. 




I have been told this, that, and the other about what I should do for a living; what major I should have. I'm not a natural at math, so I'm told I must avoid it because it's hard and proceed to go into liberal arts. 

Go into a tech program, you'll get done in two years and then you'll have a job; that's where the jobs are after all. You have a face for television, go into telecommunications instead of journalism, that way you don't need to take the upper-level writing classes. Don't follow your curiosity to become a geneticist, go become a history major instead, you've done great on your AP History tests.

It's a joke that students keep getting told to avoid the hard classes and simply work in what they already have a knack for. We're breeding a population of one sided people, who only know about what they're good at. We aren't encouraging well-roundedness and we aren't encouraging curiosity. If we were encouraging people to branch out and explore what they're curious about, we wouldn't have so many unemployed English, liberal arts, and history majors. By discouraging curiosity we are discouraging learning. Without curiosity people are just attending school to get the credentials to get a job, not to gain the knowledge to succeed. 

I didn't pick up my dual degree in Environmental Science until this semester. I had been told by counselors at my community college that it would be a waste of my time, as I would be tacking on three more years of school to my education. However, luckily, when I arrived at the University of Florida, a school that truly embraces science, my desire to branch out was welcomed. I was encouraged to take on a dual degree, and I am so glad I did. I have the ability to study what I want. While money is a difficult side to prolonging my schooling, I'm not worried. If I get to get the education I think I'll be happy with, I'll worry about the debt later.



I will see you tomorrow, I promise.