okay so i thought today i would talk about my academic journey and basically how from high
school to undergrad to grad school all the things that happened to get me to where i am now excuse
the sound over there from jerry he's moving rocks and if you hear snoring that's abbott sleeping so
apologies all right so when i was in high school i was like this total hippie at heart i wore like
tie-dye and i drove a prius for goodness sake as a high schooler that was what i wanted with a whole
bunch of bumper stickers that talked about how important solar energy is and that we all live
downstream or whatever that bumper sticker is and so i was a true hippie at heart but i also
was really interested in helping people and i was really interested in going into
medicine and being pre-med and so i spent my entire high school career um volunteering at
the services for brain injury center over in my hometown and at one of the hospitals over there
i even like got a stethoscope i think for christmas i was really committed
and my family was super supportive and said that i would make a great doctor
and um so i was like also very impressionable and i knew i was super impressionable and i thought
that my life as a doctor would be like meredith gray from grey's anatomy which i watched every
week with all my friends and so that was what i thought my life was going to be like and then i
actually actually chose uc irvine as um the place to go for undergrad because they had such a strong
pre-med biology department and program so i went to uc irvine and i had one quarter while i was
there that was so difficult i took genetics Ochem and physics in a single quarter it was
fall quarter and at the end i remember going home and i had basically failed pretty much
because anything below c minus you have to retake i have basically failed every single class i had
taken that quarter except for one of my classes and so the department told me i had to change
my major because my chemistry grade my chemistry overall gpa was too low and so of course i went
home for christmas break and was just in tears all of break because i was like what am
i gonna do i thought this is what i was gonna do for my whole life and i was just destroyed
and then i realized that i could change my major to earth and environmental sciences change to the
school of physical sciences and do something that was a little bit more honestly what was reflective
of who i was as a person and what i was probably more inclined to do anyways and so i changed my
major and ended up having to take more physics in that major so that was a little bit of a bummer
but i started to volunteer at the arboretum and got really close to the people that worked and
ran the arboretum started to do uh research in the freshwater and brackish marshes of the san joaquin
reserve which is part of the uc natural reserve system which was super cool
and had the most incredible mentor dr peter bowler and we are still in contact and share
our marsh photos back and forth and check in on each other all the time
so i really attribute a lot of my success as an undergrad to his mentorship
and it really prepared me for graduate school and during this time i also got scuba certified and
was really into diving and couldn't decide whether or not i was going to do terrestrial ecology or
marine ecology and i was really torn and so then when i moved back home you're snoring so loud
so i applied to grad school as a fourth year at uc irvine and i didn't get into grad school and i
realized it was because i did not have enough experience to qualify me for grad school and
so i spent my entire year off gaining as much experience as possible so i got a gis
certificate certificate from san francisco state university which is basically gis is
is basically just um a way to analyze uh and visualize spatial data so
google earth if you play with google earth in a way sort of that's sort of like gis um and so
i got that certificate i started volunteering at the california academy sciences which was awesome
and i got to eat at this awesome co-op bakery right outside of golden gate park
i mean this was like the life i got uh dive master certified i started working in elkhorn slough and
it was all just fabulous and the best time and i just had all this energy
and was just a sponge to everything i could get exposed to and it was
probably like the best time of my life besides grad school anyways and so then
i applied to grad school to work in elkhorn slough which was the perfect compromise for me because it
it met my cravings to study both terrestrial and marine ecology because elkhorn slough is an estuary
and it's at the lancy interface and so you get to experience both terrestrial ecology and marine
ecology in one single system so it was perfect and that's when i started grad school and the rest
is history and so i just thought i'd share that because there's some failures in there and i think
it's really important to be super honest about those things so i hope you enjoyed this video and
if you would like to um you know comment below about things that some hardships you're going
through or some failures you've had that are hard to overcome or making it difficult for you to have
the confidence to keep on pursuing your dreams i'd love to facilitate a dialogue on that and to
be your your cheerleader so we're not gonna get an end of the video clip with abbott because
he's sound asleep so for now we'll just say uh thank you for watching and i hope you enjoyed