When I was in high school, I loved history. I had the best high school history teacher ever and she really turned me on to that subject. Plus, I had a photographic memory so I could memorize dates and facts fairly easy. I wasn't as fond of writing about it, but i loved teaching others about something I was so passionate about. My senior year, I decided to do academic decathalon because my high school teacher was the coach and because it was basically memorize lots and lots of facts and regurgitate them at competitions. We had a class much like a practice for a sport at the end of the day and i LOVED it. Until i got to the math part of the decathalon. I have never been good with numbers and absolutely hated the math portion. It kicked my butt in a super bad way. It really turned me off to think I couldn't be successful just because of one subject. Also, about this time, I had something else going on in my life as well that was pulling me in a totally different direction. I had gotten a horse after years and years of wanting and begging and pleading. I had saved up my money and bought him and I was boarding him south of town. I went out every day to see him and ride him and love on him and I was head over heels about him. I was also big into FFA my senior year, competing in prepared public speaking and horse judging. I was starting to uncover another love of mine, agriculture. My senior year in the summer, I worked out on the experiment station in Jackson for a horticulture scientist which uncovered another love of mine, research. I knew I wanted to go to a local college and I was deciding between Union U, the local baptist college and UT martin. UTM was about an hour away and I wasn't sure I wanted to be that far away from my mom ( i was big time mommy's girl), but it had an animal science program so I could actually study horses and agriculture! Union U was in town but I would have to live at home and I needed to get out and be on my own, plus my love of history was waning.
I headed out to UTM to major in animal science. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with the degree. I didn't really want to go to vet school but i wanted to study agriculture and animals. I worked full time at the school's rodeo facility that had a 52 stall barn and bulls, steers, calves and bucking horses as well as boarding horses. They also had an on farm house that i could live in and get out of the dorms which was a huge bonus for me. Dorm life was too loud and hectic and I think I went a whole semester with no sleep. I got my degree done in 3 years thanks to having a full time job that kept me in town during the summer too. I had met a wonderful professor who was doing lots of research in the swine industry and got involved with helping with several of his projects. This re awoke the love I had for research. I had been looking at grad schools throughout my stay in martin and was narrowing it down between repro science which was my favorite class and food science/food safety which was a very hot research area and very well funded. I chose food science/food safety and narrowed it down to two schools, KSU and UK. In the end, the town of manhattan won me over with it's rural-ness that was very similar to martin. I had really grown to love martin and would have stayed if I could have found a job but in a little town, jobs are hard to come by and UTM didn't have a master's program. So off I went to manhattan KS, the little apple to start a new chapter in my life.
To say that living in manhattan and getting my master's degree in food safety was easy was an understatement. For purposes I don't want to get into in this blog, it was the hardest 5 years of my life. I had the worse and best experiences of my life and it almost cost me my life, but we aren't going to get into that today. At the same time, I learned so much and really loved the research we did. My masters focused on pre-harvest food safety and I LOVED this area. Working with animals and microbiology really took both of my favorite areas and married them together. In a nutshell, I was trying to find a diet using dried distiller's grains to reduce acid resistant bacteria. We looked at general coliforms and e. coli and not specific pathogens but the work I did helped to open the door for more pathogen specific work and started KSU into being one of the leaders in pre-harvest food safety. My project was more than just cattle work and lab work. I also did meat studies including a professional taste panel, a retail color study, a study of the CLA and LA in the ribeyes and also ruminant nutrition studies to look at the effect of the diets we used on finishing the cattle.
Loved living in Colorado
Fast forward to the end of my grad career, I took a job in industry traveling for a small start up company in Golden CO that had a novel instrumentation for pathogen detection. While i got to travel all over the US and the world and see some pretty cool stuff, I didn't enjoy traveling 5 days a week and my dogs and boyfriend (now hubby) were still in manhattan. I decided that i would give it a year and if I still wasn't happy, I would go back to KS. Well, I knew that even before the year was up that I wasn't cut out for this job. I started applying for jobs back in KS and KSU. Because of my experiences during my grad career, I was limited to jobs not in my field if I moved back home. I remember applying to my current lab position as I had been applying to any and all lab positions. I remember my boss asking why I wanted to take a pay cut and come back to manhattan. I had a pic of my dogs and tony and she understood. She didn't mind that my degrees and experience were elsewhere. She wanted someone to train and i was a blank slate.
in newmarket England at the National Horse Museum
Now my current job. I am a developmental biologist who practices some genetics, some molecular biology and is an expert in RNAi interference. I work with a genetic model organism, Tribolium castaneum or the red flour beetle. Unfortunately, we ran out of funding about the time i was due to have andrew. We let go of a tech, stop taking grad students and paired down our undergrads. The opportunity to be a service center for a genome sequencing company that had a novel genome sequencer arose and we took it. So I had a baby, got back from maternity leave and had to learn a whole new job. There have been many ups and downs but I can say now that I am also an expert in retrieval of high molecular weight DNA. What is that? Well, old sequencers use small pieces of DNA, on the base pair level (bp). We extract DNA that is in the mega base (mb) range and read pieces that are 200 to 500 kilo base pairs (kb), so the biggest pieces you can keep intact. It is an art form that is incredible hard and there are no kits available to help so everything must be done by hand the old fashion way. We have had many failures but are starting to have successes and I am glad to be a part of it. I won't lie, it has been hard on my scientific soul to have so many failures but I remember all the great scientist before me that had many years of failures before they had great success.
So the moral of the story is, don't think you have to be defined by what you want to do even as early as high school. Back home now you have to pick a track and stick to it or go to a magnet school for what you want to do. I hate this!!! I hated science as a kid and now i love it. I would have hated to have not had the opportunity to dabble in all the areas I dabbled in as early as high school. I have taken mainly ag and food science courses yet my job is in genetics and molecular biology. I am a true testament to being well rounded and diversified. I hope that kids these days get the same experience and dont' feel the pressures to grow up to be a certain predetermined job.
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