today i'm going to just explain sort of how i got to where i am and in particular how i made
the decision um when i was a college student to switch my career path to oceanography uh instead
of what i planned which was to go to medical school i'd always been interested in the ocean
growing up especially um i think i i wanted to be like a dolphin or a whale trainer
when i was in college and i was deciding what i wanted to do um after college i kind of got
away from the idea of being a whale trainer uh or you know being a marine biologist just because
i thought like that's such a cool job like everyone's gonna want to do it right
i mean all you have to do is look at some of the other videos on here made by mike
um or our other marine biologists and just like feel you know like oh wouldn't that be the coolest
thing to do that's a lot of competition for someone who is from the midwest where there
are no oceans i had good grades and um you know my family encouraged me to take advantage of that and
go to medical school so that is sort of what i plan to do but then in my junior year of college
i wanted to do something different for my semester abroad experience i read about this program called
sea semester um and sea stands for sea education association and it was pretty much like the
craziest semester abroad experience that that i could think of doing um and the reason is that
it is a uh six-week on-land program um where you learn about oceanography
and uh sailing and then it is a six-week uh trip to sea on a sailing vessel so yes like a sailboat
um and so i for someone who had never been out of sight of land uh you know in their entire life
this sounded pretty exciting and very cool and i sort of looked at it
as a way to live out my dreams of you know being an oceanographer or marine biologist
while still maintaining my uh practical um career plans of going to medical school
so i did a program that was focused on uh the oceans and climate change and
we sailed from mexico all the way to tahiti and so there were times on this cruise where um the space
station could pass overhead and we would just know that like those humans on the space station
were the closest humans to our ship uh you know anywhere around us um so it's pretty isolated
out there the ocean's a really big place and this experience really showed me that um marine science
was still something that that i really loved that i found very interesting um fascinating even
and um that maybe i could make a career out of this after all uh and that it would be something
that i could be really passionate about so that even when you know things got tough that i would
have you know the strength and the energy to keep going and i was just so much happier um being
outside um working uh in the sun then i predicted that i would be if i went to medical school
which at grad school is stressful but so is medical school and so i felt like it was important
that i really enjoy or care about whatever i was um working on so at the last minute um
i mean not really at the last minute but my senior year of college in the fall semester is which is
the time when you're applying to medical school or to grad school i kind of changed all of my plans
because i just had this feeling that this was what i should do so i applied to all uh oceanography
programs and i did not tell my family at first like i did not tell my parents because i thought
that they would be upset and um they were a little bit surprised funny thing is kind of
like how this story ends um because one thing i remember my dad saying when uh when i first told
him that i was gonna do a phd in oceanography was um you know that there weren't going to be
any jobs when i was finished and at the time i was just like of course there will be jobs like
i could work for the government i could uh you know be a professor i could do all sorts of things
uh but i was very naive in a way he was kind of right because it is a much more competitive
world in the academic research world in the oceanography world than i was anticipating um as
a senior in college um and so looking back uh it was not an easy road um to get to where i am now
but that the interest and the fascination that i have with what i study has really sustained
and and pushed me through the tough times um i never thought i'd be back in the midwest uh since
i studied oceanography but here i am um because that's where the opportunity was and it turns out
that the great lakes which is i think where i'll spend a lot of my time now in the coming years uh
they are a lot like oceans um they just don't have salt and the microbes that live in the
great lakes are completely different and i think that's actually really exciting so the lesson is
do what you're interested in keep an open mind be flexible and things will work out
bellagio and i would like to remind you to
like share subscribe and spread the word that science is for everyone and anyone can do science
right