Inside, I’m greeted by cool air and an efficient student worker who asks for my ID. I brace—internally—for a tuition-adjacent total, the kind of number that makes you reevaluate your need for an education. Instead, they scan my card, hand me a neatly packed tote full of required readings, and smile like this happens all the time.
Right. Full scholarship.
Which, rationally, I know is the only reason I’m here. If these books hadn’t come pre-paid by academic merit and one extremely persistent letter-writing mentor, I would still be by the Atlantic, pouring coffee for fishers and cataloguing cephalopod trivia in my head. So yes, I’m grateful. Beyond grateful.
And still—there’s a flicker of discomfort I can’t quite name. Like I’ve found some secret back door into academia that wasn’t meant for people like me, and now I’m sneaking around hoping the system doesn’t notice. Which is ridiculous. I earned this. I know that. But imposter syndrome doesn’t respond well to logic. It feeds on moments like these. On small kindnesses that feel too big. On paperwork that confirms you belong, while your brain continues to draft appeals for reconsideration.
And just like that, the anxiety returns. Not loud, not screaming—just a quiet, needling reminder that luck, in any meaningful amount, comes with terms and conditions. And absolutely no margin for error.
I shove the tote over my shoulder, smile back at the student worker, and walk out like someone who knows exactly what she’s doing.
No one needs to know that I very muchdo not.
It’s not until I’m seated on my bed—books unpacked, stickers on the wall, clothes where they nominally belong, and a half-eaten spam musubi balanced on my lap—that I allow myself the kind of self-reflection any therapist would frame and hang on their office wall.
I start with the basics. What I do know, empirically: I’m happy to be here. I’m proud of every carefully engineered step that got me to this exact bed, this exact school, this exact—frankly life-altering—snack. That part’s easy. That part scans. But emotional science doesn’t stop at observable data, so I go deeper. Because surface-level feelings always float on something else, right?
I miss the cold. I miss the fog. I miss the Atlantic biting at my face and the gulls screaming like tiny, feathered nihilists. I am, to be clear, still unsettled by what I can only describe as a rogue coalition of feral chickens claiming land rights.
And underneath all of that, there are a million things I don’t know. A million questions, untested theories, branching possibilities about how this year will unfold—who I’ll meet, who I’ll become. And while that thought should send me spiraling into a full academic-grade panic, it doesn’t.
Because people think science is about answers. But I’ve always liked the questions best. That narrow space between certainty and mystery? That’s where the good stuff lives.
The chaos of it, the not-knowing, the floating hypotheses waiting to be tested—it’s unsettling, sure. But it’s also exhilarating. The whole point of inquiry is that you don’t start with conclusions. You start with curiosity. And if there’s one thing I’ve never lacked, it’s that.
So no, I don’t know if I’ll thrive here. I don’t know if I’ll make friends, or survive graduate-level statistics, or ever get used to sweating through three layers of SPF by 9 a.m. I don’t know if I’ll learn to surf, or fall in love, or end up crying in a lab at 2 a.m. because the data won’t line up the way I need it to.
But I do know how to investigate. I know how to adapt. I know how to take uncertainty and break it into manageable pieces until it becomes something I can hold in my hands.
I know how to begin.
CHAPTER TWO
My mentor once told me science was about making peace with being the most clueless person in the room. At the time, I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.
I learned that the hard way during my undergrad, when I spent an entire seminar on marine chemical ecology trying to Google terms under the table without looking suspicious. Spoiler: I looked suspicious. Also, Google doesn’t know what to do withallelopathy in benthic invertebrates.
I’ve since accepted that confusion is part of the job description. If you’re not regularly overwhelmed, you’re probably doing it wrong.
That same mindset—that science rewards curiosity, tolerates uncertainty, and occasionally requires emotional triage—is what gets me through the first week of lectures and orientation. That, and the constant, lovingly judgmental curation of Maya’s playlist in my name, which now includes a song for every time I said something remotely nerdy or accidentally wore my shirt inside out. (Twice. So far.)
I’ve acclimated about as well as a bag of goldfish undergoing their ceremonial float-in-the-new-tank ritual. Which is to say: not dead. Marginally confused. But adapting.
And now, finally, the part of this entire academic pilgrimage I’ve been most excited for is about to begin.
Because yes, I am here for myself. To learn, to grow, to evolve into one of those sharp, formidable women in STEM who make biotech bros deeply uncomfortable. But I amalsohere for BIOL 403. The Field Problems course. The one that haunted my dreams during undergrad and has been on my vision board since I learned what a vision board was.
Mostly because it’s taught byher.
Dr. Kymbert. A legend. A one-woman institution. She wears pantsuits and her research on coral microbiome manipulation—engineering symbiotic communities within coral polyps to make reefs more resilient to stressors—is basically marine wizardry.
I’ve read every paper she’s ever published. Twice. Some of them three times, but only because I got too distracted by the footnotes the first time through. If I ever manage to exude even 12% of her intellectual authority, I will consider my life a success. Anything more and I’m running for office.
And so I take my seat in the small lecture hall—beige walls, noise-canceling panels in varying shades of turquoise, with chairs to match. It’s compact, maybe forty seats total, which suits me just fine. Less space between me and the woman I’ve been idolizing since sophomore year.
Students trickle in, some buzzing with the same barely-contained anticipation currently speeding up my heart rate, others radiating the energy of people who deeply resent being awake on a Monday. Theroom hums with shifting backpacks, tired conversation, and the faint scraping of laptops opening.
The anticipation breaks five minutes later when Dr. Kymbert walks in through the double doors at the back, descending the steps like gravity bends slightly in her favor, with nothing in hand but a dry erase marker.
