I Wanna Be A Scientist When I Grow Up

This post was revised on April 30, 2008.

I wanted to be lots of things when I was growing up.

Initially, I wanted to be a copywriter or a novel writer. I wanted to do something creative, and something that would not need me to talk too much. That was 6th grade.

Yet, on 7th grade, joining the school’s astronomy club changed my career direction entirely. Astronomy opened up my eyes to the world of science, and I found myself falling in love with this world. So I told myself that I wanted to be an astronomer (although in the meantime, I also tossed around the idea of being a crime fighter!).

I still remember that during junior high, when a friend and I were chatting one day and she asked me what I wanted to do after I was done with school, I refused to tell her. All I said was that it’d be something related to science. Being a friend, though somehow, she understood me more than she ought to, and said, “Oh. I know. Something requires more than just getting a PhD, right?”

That’s right. Something requires more than just getting a PhD. I wanted to do science for a living. To stare at the sky for my entire life. But you know why I refused to give her a straight answer? ‘Cause I didn’t even believe that I could do it. Yet, I was more than happy to keep it as a little secret dream of mine throughout high school.

Before the end of high school, everything indicated that the schools of my choice would not stop me from pursuing this dream though if it was really what I wanted. However, it was also a time when I made my I-wanna-be-a-scientist dream public when relatives and acquistances asked, and that’s when I began to hear craps like girls shouldn’t do this, and girls shouldn’t do that. I don’t know if those noises had anything to do with it, but I ended up not choosing astronomy as my college major. I chose aeronautical engineering instead. The reason I gave myself was that it was easier to get an engineering job. But seriously, getting a job in aeronautical engineering was not any easier. In retrospect, I think I was chickened out with the fact that, if I went ahead with astronomy, I would have to go all the way to get a PhD and beyond, which I wasn’t sure if I could do it. Besides, I think by then, I was already freed up by those girls-shouldn’t-do-this craps that I was ready to go out to prove myself to the world, and what’s better than announcing that I’d become a rocket scientist, huh? (Lame, wasn’t I? Rebellious. I know).  Besides, I felt “safer” to become an engineer just like my father, rather than being a totally independent woman going off to an unknown lala land.

Up to this point, nevertheless, the aspiration was merely about getting into college, so that I could spend more time on space stuff, along with the fact that I would be trained to get a job with a cool job title and rewarded by regular paychecks. But quite honestly, I had no idea what a rocket scientist, or any kind of scientist, does on a daily basis. I mean, two of my extended relatives are professors – one of them is an astrophysicist and the other is a food scientist. But they are extended relatives and were living somewhere overseas. So I got a good concept of what a scientist does from… hmm… television (?!), but I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Nevertheless, I got lucky enough to get into a good college, where many professors were good at research as well as at teaching. One of them was particularly skilled at explaining complicated concepts at Intro classes. I admired this particular professor the most as a teacher as he always managed to use the simplest language to teach us the latest and greatest discoveries in the field.  He reminded us frequently that there were wayyyy more in this field than he was teaching us in class, and I still remember that he often enjoyed throwing us this line at the very end of class: “If you wanna know more about this, take graduate level class xxx”.

The line annoyed me. It was as if I was being read the most enjoyable novel, and he took away the end chapter. every. time! Yet, because of him, I ended up getting a small stipend and joined his lab the following summer to find out the first time for real what an engineer-scientist do on a daily basis. And boy, did I like it?! I still remember how I was literally jumping up and down when I was telling my father about “all these cool things” the scientists did in their labs.

Upon graduation, I landed a job at a research institute and became an independent professional.  Since then, I’d begun to spend more time attempting to answer questions, on top of asking them and absorbing materials.  It was also a period when I began to firmly tell myself as well as others in public that “yes, I wanna be a scientist”, and I didn’t care if you reminded me that I am a woman and an ethnic minority, or that I was thinking too highly of myself.  I’d picked up this fearless, “can do” attitude from where I work, you know.  In fact, I even began encouraging other gender and racial minorities to do the same. 

What surprised me, though, was that I am instead heading toward a path of becoming a clinician-scientist, as opposed to an engineer-scientist, these days. I suppose life does tricks to people. I am still using many skills and techniques that I learned as an engineer-scientist appentice, but I am nevertheless in a different field, which I like and find it fits my personality better.

Whether it is an astronomer, an engineer-scientist, or a clinician-scientist, these nouns have become more than cool job titles. They are, rather, three-dimensional descriptions of what people do when they are away from their families. They describe the kind of questions that the people involved contemplate during the majority of their time, and the kinds of expertise they excel at and use to contribute to the society, which means wayyyy more than staring at a computer, seeing patients, or staring at the sky all day.  For me, specifically, the choice has not only affected my lifestyle, the way I see the world, but also the people I associate with.  So not only is it more than a job title, or a job, it also describes the way I live my life thus far.  Boy.  How little did I know what I was getting into. 

Over the years, my mentality toward the relative future has also changed quite siginificantly.  I have gone from doubting if I was good enough for grad school to having confident that I would land a faculty position “for sure” (yeah, right ::rolling eyes:: ) to knowing that I can at least finish school and graduate and find it relieving.  I have also decided that even if I am deemed to be not a Nobel prize winner kind of material, or an Assistant Professor kind of material, I will keep on pursuing this scientific career for as long as I can until I can go no further.  For I enjoy what I do each day, and I would rather bet on this than doing the alternative and forever wondering what if.  For I have also found that when I no longer look at the end result as the prize, but rather, look at the journey as the prize itself, each day in itself is precious.

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This post is written for the scientiae carnival.

The upcoming edition of scientiae will be posted at Flicka Mawa on May 1. Topic of the month:
• How have your career goals changed in the past year? 5 years? 10 years?
• How has your perception of self changed in the past year? 5 years? 10 years?
• How is where you are now different from what you imagined for yourself as you worked toward this point?
• How much of a role have things outside of science had on your changing career goals?