How re-discovering my past passions led to new career ideas
Over Christmas break, I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom because my parents were getting ready to put the house up for sale and move on to their new stage of life. During the process, I found a short story, essay, and poem that I had written in elementary school. To my surprise, they weren’t too bad for a kid with limited vocabulary, and reading them brought back a lot of memories from my middle and high school years. I absolutely loved to read fiction novels; I went to my local library almost every week to check out a new book. I also remember attempting to write the first chapter of my own novel at one point, though that never came to fruition. Late in high school, I took an advanced English Literature course and that is where I truly thrived. At our senior awards night before graduation, I ended up taking home the English Department Award.
Fast-forward to now, and I am a PhD candidate in toxicology studying the effects of a widely used herbicide on development of the intestine. How did I end up on such a different path? Well, I also enjoyed my science courses in high school and was specifically interested in forensic science. So, when I was thinking about college majors, I chose to go in that direction and keep reading and writing as a hobby. I graduated with a B.S. in Forensic Science with a concentration in Chemistry. I left with research experience, as I had joined a drugs-of-abuse research lab in my junior year. My undergraduate mentors convinced me to go for my PhD, and so I joined the Toxicology program at North Carolina State University. My favorite part of graduate school was during my first year, where I read hundreds of papers to familiarize myself with the field, and to generate hypotheses for my project. After that, my research got more difficult, and the pandemic hit at the end of my second year, which caused me to start thinking more deeply about what I wanted to achieve with my career and whether I wanted to stay in research and academia.
Around this time, I joined Science Twitter, where my world was blown wide open. I learned about careers in science communication, writing, and editing. I read articles and blog posts by people like me who were re-thinking their career paths and what they wanted out of life. They described their worries and fears, but also the passions they had forgotten about or re-discovered after all this time. I resonated so deeply with these people I had never met and that is when my awakening began. I was going to be okay, and it was possible for me to combine my love of science and learning with my love of reading and writing. This was when I told myself it was okay to take a rest break and start a new book, instead of overthinking my experiment from that day, and to start a blog and just write about these feelings. This was when I took a breath and thought back to my science professors that commented on my writing skills, and to the joy I experienced reading an exciting new article. I could still be who I wanted to be when I was a little girl, as those passions did not go away, they just had to be re-discovered and re-imagined. Therefore, my advice for anyone reading this is not to forget the parts of you that may have taken a back seat since you started college or your job. Get to know yourself, take the time to figure out what you truly love doing and get back to it!
Julia Grzymkowski is a PhD candidate at NC State University studying toxicology and developmental biology. Follow her on Twitter.
