Down the Rabbit Hole

Reality Check

30 Day Blogging Challenge
PROMPT May 22nd
When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

With the exception of a brief stint where I wanted to be a roller skating rocker at the age of eight, I had always dreamed of being an ocean explorer. My heroes growing up were Jacques Cousteau and Dr. Eugene Clark, aka "the Shark lady". I was positively captivated by the sea and spent more time under water than I did above it. I attacked my future career path with a healthy ambition too. I got my scuba certification before I could drive. I read everything I could about the sea and its creatures and ecosystems.

I became an avid science student and eventually a high school aquanaut. I took my inaugural submarine dive as a softmore in high school. My junior year I took a week long trip with Semester at Sea out of Woods Hole, MA. Woods Hole was like my mecca, with it's harbor heavy with vessels bearing NOAA and National Geographic emblems on their bows. My senior year was spent in independent studies with Project O and the US Coast Guard marine studies core. I tried, unsuccessfully to talk my parents into allowing me to go shark diving off the coast of California and to camp out with the Orca pods in Nova Scotia. They did grant me permission to go to Australia and New Zealand as part of the People to People Science Exchange the summer before my freshman year of college. At seventeen I was blessed with the once in a lifetime opportunity to dive on the Great Barrier Reef off the Queensland coast of Australia. It was easily the highlight of my entire academic career.

At seventeen, I felt like I had amassed a pretty amazing resume of experiences and that I was well on my way to pursuing my dreams. I took a semester at the University of Hawaii on Hilo, an opportunity for in-field study that was offered as part of my marine biology degree program. Two weeks in and I had already decided to transfer to there to finish my degree when a very frank conversation with a very honest professor, turned my life around. He was someone I had really come to respect in such a short time and he spoke with me about the world I was planning to immerse myself in. This teacher had perhaps the best take on my personality and potential as any I had. He saw the passion and ambition in me and cared enough to tell me the truth about a world I had only seen through rose-colored glasses. The world I was after was not going to be a golden, grant paved road to the Discovery Channel I had imagined for myself. It was going to be years and years of frustration soaked service to someone who had more letters behind their last name than I had. It was a life spent on rolling oceans and in under funded laboratories that might give me the opportunity to seize on the next great scientific discovery...but that credit would likely go to someone else first, someone who had already put in the time, the money and the blood and tears. He spoke to be very candidly, in the way he wished someone had cared enough to do for him when he was in my place all those years ago.

That conversation, and the ones that would follow that summer, changed the trajectory of my life for good. I can easily say, with some minor regrets, that he had been 100% right about everything.