Note: I wanted to write something else today, but this came out instead. It's a short piece, and I may or may not add any more to it.
It’s been exactly one year since I started my first semester at university, following a few years of community college. While I’ve grown much more comfortable with university over the last year or so, I still can’t really believe that I’ve made it this far… and am still going farther.
As such, I still very much feel out-of-place at university for a myriad of reasons. Sure, I get good grades. Sure, I’m fascinated with science, especially Biology-the study of living things. But, I’m still the campus oddball, and I still lack the words to describe what exactly I mean by that (but I’ll still try… again).
Last semester, I joined my Microbiology professor for office hours because I’d missed one of his lectures, and there was an exam coming up. About twenty minutes into him walking me through his lecture slides, he mentioned how we (as scientists) have managed to make farm-raised Salmon grow three times bigger than wild salmon via genetic engineering.
“Well, I guess I won’t have to hold the fish up to the camera anymore…” I mumbled, smirking to myself.
“Pardon?” my professor (who was- and is- the Biology department chair) asked.
“I guess I won’t have to hold the fish up the camera anymore.” I repeated myself, still smiling.
My professor stared at me for a moment as the joke flew completely over his head.
“I mean…” I cleared my throat after a long, awkward silence, “After you catch a fish, you’re supposed to hold it up to the camera to make it look much bigger than it really is. Y’know, so you can brag about it later on. With these massive, GMO fish, you wouldn’t have to hold them up to the camera to make them look big.”
My professor finally got the joke, but he wasn’t laughing. Instead, he just moved on with the lecture as I felt my face turn hot with embarrassment.
I relayed that story to my family in Minnesota over the holidays, much to their amusement. Unlike my Microbiology professor, my relatives knew exactly what the joke meant. In fact, I’m pretty sure they taught me that joke. Sadly, it just didn’t land with a professor who’d spent his whole life attending and teaching at inner-city universities, completely oblivious to the redneck culture that largely raised me.
But, a couple weeks after I embarrassed myself during office hours, my professor sent me an email with a link to a new PBS documentary about a scientist called Dr. Philip Allan Sharp. Turns out, Dr. Sharp grew up on a farm in the middle-of-nowhere Kentucky, and became the first in his family to not only go to college, but to earn his PhD and later a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research into RNA (which paved the way to things such as mRNA vaccines).
Evidently, my professor sensed my insecurity while I sat in his office, and wanted to make sure that I knew, under no uncertain terms, that I belonged at university.
Moreover, my family in Minnesota made sure to let me know that they were proud of me for going to university, and were cheering me on.
After all, modern-day farmers and ranchers often work hand-in-hand with scientists and academics to grow crops, care for livestock, and maintain farming equipment. In fact, farming basically is a science. What seems to set farmers and academics apart has to do more with culture rather than what they do for work.
Both scientists and farmers have to know a ton about the natural world around them, so that they can manipulate the natural world to work in their favor. I mean… all crops and livestock- including the “certified organic” ones- are genetically modified so much so that they can’t exist in the wild without human intervention.
Turns out, it takes the mind of a scientist to pair two or more things together to produce offspring with a desired trait, whether that’s sweeter sweet corn or a Hereford bull that never grows horns.
In other words, I do come from a long lineage of scientists. Those scientists were (and are) just a little culturally different than the scientists who wear white lab coats and teach lectures to hundreds (and sometimes even thousands) of people at a time.
So, as I stare down the barrel of yet another semester at university, I’m not nearly as anxious about it as I have been in the past. Largely because of the realization I just made.
Instead of pulling me away from my rural, Minnesota relatives whom I dearly love and admire, my education may actually bring me much closer to them. Especially since farming and ranching are just branches of Biology. Though, in an effort to sound much more hoity-toity (which is a word my family has always thrown around, particularly to make fun of my dad for “moving to the big city” years ago), universities call farming and ranching shit like “agricultural studies” and “animal husbandry”.
Why universities like to hide simple terms behind big words, I will never understand.
To be continued…
