Cells, Seniors, and the Real World!

It's September already? How can this be!? It seems like last weekend I was planning on applying to Semester at Sea. Instead somehow I have managed to get accepted, travel around the world, and spend a summer readjusting to life at home in what feels like the blink of an eye. Time has flown and now I stand a week into my senior year of college! Which I guess technically is my senior year-and-a-half as I will need to stick on an extra semester at the end.

While I feel very excited about this, it also scares the hell out of me! I've never been one of those all-star geniuses in college who captained the debate team, breezed through calculus, and read textbooks on analytical chemistry for fun while also finding the time to cure cancer and create cold fusion on the side.

No instead I was the green Aerospace freshman who dug a massive hole for his GPA through a year of uncertainty culminating in a D in Engineering Computing, a withdrawal from Calculus 2, and a change of majors to something easier... Like Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.

But the change of majors was a welcome and invigorating breath of fresh air so I left the past in the past, buckled down and stumbled through three semesters of Chemistry and Biology classes before embarking on the most fantastic journey of my life with Semester at Sea. It sounds so cliche but it really was a life changing experience. I returned to the States feeling more confident and sure of myself than I've ever felt. I also felt like I had been given a new direction, and finally I had that motivation I had been searching for in my post-high school years.

Over time though the fiery excitement, passion, and drive I felt when I first returned smoldered and cooled off a bit as I settled back into the summer routine of work and excessive hours of electronic entertainment. As the first week of school wound to a close I found myself wrestling with those old familiar feelings of uncertainty and doubt over my future. While I've scraped my way back up to a 3.0 GPA, I still feel like my academic record wont hold up to grab one of those ever more competitive potential jobs at the end of all this. On top of that, I'm still not sure exactly what I want to do! Seeing the world has motivated me to find some way to contribute to a better future but how exactly do I go about doing that?

I also can't help but feel like I missed the boat this semester from the internship perspective. I am working but not at jobs that will likely help advance my career save for a resume reference. Many of my fellow MCDB seniors have positions in labs conducting promising research but I have no such connections and feel I am running out of time to create them. My schedule this semester is full enough that I'm sure these next four months will pass just as quickly as the rest of this year already has.

So I'll just do the best I can, put my nose to the grindstone and power through three more semesters. I hope to find myself interning somewhere by next Summer and then hopefully either starting my career with a part time job during my last semester next fall or hoping that with 2010 comes a fantastic new job!