Why environmental biology? And other silly questions that makes me cry

septiembre 25, 2023

I remember being really young when I was gifted a barbie that came with two puppies and a kitten, and I love them. I even remember a particular time when I was playing that my barbie was a petsitter for this many puppies and kittens, and thought to myself "I don't want to be a veterinarian, kittens die, I much rather be a petsitter....nah, no one would pay for someone else to play with their pets".

I was terribly obsessed with animals, all my life, I used to watch animal planet religiously and LOVE Steve Irwin, so if you take both factores, the "I want to take care of animals but not being a veterinarian" and the "deadly obsession with animals" and mix them together, you get nothing...so I gave up.

Wasn't until I get to high school that I decided I was best in science. After all my favourite subjects always go around science, but I didn’t know about a single job that sound right. Until one day at physics class, I was looking in the school book and I came across some descriptions of the planet in the solar system and the gravitational difference between them, I was quickly interested in the calculations and stuff like that, so why not physics? It was cool. I spend some good three years planning that, I wanted to be an astronomer, but deep down I knew something was off, and I was right. I realise I never looked at the night sky, that may not sound as much, but I was about to dedicate my life to something I didn't even bother to pay attention to in the slightest.

But I keep going with it, after all I didn’t have any other plan either. That was until one day, in a biology class about evolution, when I spend the whole class interrupting the teacher about everything she says. After the break she called me to her desk and asked me what did I wanted to study, and I firmly say "astronomy" to which she replied saying that she expect me to say biology. That day she introduced me to biotechnology. The way she described it was just perfect, I loved it from day one, and that was one more brick in the path to my real career.

Biotechnology somehow didn't seem like a big part of me now looking in retrospective, I almost don't remember one time I was exited about it. And I guess that makes sense considering how fast I gave up on that. I was around a month or a little more before the psu. I was watching videos on YouTube when I came across one of a sanctuary for foxes in the south, and I just...I just feel this magic and peace by the idea of helping there. I then and there realice i really want to get my hands dirty, i wanted to be in contact to animals like my baby me planned, and biotechnology was a lab thing that i wasn't as confortable as i thought i was.

It take me a couple of days, maybe less than that to ask my biology teacher in my preuniversitario about it. I briefly mentioned it to a cousins of mine, about going for biology and he just say "but you now there is no work field for that, right?" And that make me mad in some way, so i ask, i ask this teacher about it and the assured me that if that was my path, there was nothing to fear because the work field definitely exist.

That was exactly one week before the psu, and as soon as the results came, i take the environmental biology option, I didn’t ask my teacher about which was the career the was talking abput, like, what biology were we talking about, so i just guess, base on how great it sound.

When I was Twelve i was so sure i was going to be a president, and my main goal was taking a ecological way to solve all the other problems of a country.

I get to the universidad de chile by the prestigious name well known in the coutry, and knowing biology was a strog field here.

All together take me to taking the decision of being a environmental biologist. A career that have my love for science and animals, taking care of them and helping saving the planet one step at the time like my childhood heroes teach me to, in one of the greates universities in the country.