The herbarium may be the reason I graduated at all.
MU Graduate Student Application Personal Statement: 4.25.2023
"In undergrad, I had a serious case of pre-med. Symptoms included lamenting 89.9% final grade averages, comparing myself to others, overachieving to the point of burnout, and identifying as a 'sophomore by credits' although no one cared. By the time I realized I did not want to go into healthcare, 'sophomore by credits' came back and bit me; I felt I was too far along in my major to change it. What would I do with my biology degree?"
The first half of undergrad was a blur. I didn't journal or post much or take many pictures the first two years. I don't remember much, except a constant feeling of deep unhappiness. Most of that was due to the internal struggle that would lead to me leaving the church-- but that will get its own very long post.
I was a pre-med biology major with chemistry and Spanish minors. I got good grades. I didn't do much else. To appease my family's desire to see me socializing, I was involved in Cru and the college marching band (physically.) But I was lonely. I had friends, but not close friends. I wasn't excited about my chosen career path. It was just another list of boxes to check off to get where other people thought I should be.
Can we please stop telling all the kids who are book smart to be doctors? Christ. Lots of other fields need smart people.
I started writing in a journal regularly again at the start of the semester in January 2020. I didn't know how much my life was about to change.
Journal IV: 1.13.2020
"Dr. P is from Peru and has studied in St. Louis, Portugal, Austria, the Canary Islands, and North Dakota. She's only been in town a week. She couldn't get the computer or projector started and had to enlist the help of Dr. M, my micro professor from last semester. They finally determined that the only way to turn on the projector was manually using a long stick by the desk. 'Oh, is that what that's for?' But the stick didn't do anything because it wasn't plugged in, so a boy wearing a cardigan and floral headband had to climb on the desk to do that."
Pam was brand new, and I admired her immediately.
1.27.2020
"Our first Plant Taxonomy quiz was today. It was much harder than expected. After she lectured, she sent us out with scissors to collect branches for making dichotomous keys. One of the grad students brought her back a big grape-like cluster of crimson berries. 'Oh, thank you-- how cute!" She loves plants so much. You could see it in the way she looked over each group's offerings, stroking stems and sniffing leaves.
I want to be as passionate about my career as she is."
1.30.2020
"Could it be I'm meant to be a botanist?
Lecture in plant tax was about preserving plants and herbaria. She passed around large yellow manila folders with 'teaching collection' written on the outside. Inside were herbarium sheets of pressed flowers, each with a neat little tag of all their pertinent details. Some were as old as the 1930s. Some of the newspapers they were wrapped in were from the 70s and 80s Parthenon. My parents both took this class here-- might they have inspected these very specimens, folded back this vintage newspaper, read the carefully typewritten print? There was something very surreal about that feeling, as though the veil separating years was very thin and my mother at twenty with long strawberry hair could appear in an empty wooden seat beside me at will.
Besides herbarium sheets, there were laminated hunks of wood, envelopes of moss, sandwich bags of fungi. There were awful little jars of pickled ginkgo seeds and other plant reproductive structures; I felt as though one of the bulbous spheres would turn in the oily brine and reveal itself to be a human eyeball. Still, each thing was fascinating and lovely in its own way, and some deep aesthetic need I haven't felt since childhood romps through the woods awakened.
Then she said the most magical thing: 'Let's head next door to the herbarium.' I have been dying to step inside for ages. Every day I'm on campus, I pass that locked, windowless door and wonder what's inside. Now that I've learned what a herbarium is, I've wondered even more.
We followed her in a single-file line two doors down. The herbarium door swung open. It's a tall room with tall cabinets lining the walls and even more forming rows. The wall opposite the doors is all windows looking out over 3rd Ave. There's a long desk there scattered with equipment, books, the royal-looking herbarium stamp, specimens, folders. The bit of white wall between the windowsill and the desk is crowded with black and white folders of distinguished-looking men. I recognized one as Dr. Evans, the plant taxonomy professor my parents both loved. I've looked him up before. He's an expert on medical plants in South America and won many grants for research in his 40+ years here. His plant tax class was mostly fieldwork and the students would meet at local parks to collect plants. Daddy spoke well of him.
There was something so overwhelmingly beautiful about the herbarium that I could have cried. The soft sunlight, the organized chaos of old fabric-bound books and fossils and leaves, the old photographs, the vintage college aesthetic-- I could have spent hours in that room.
Do I love botany, or do I love the aesthetic?"
I never got the full Plant Taxonomy experience. March 11, 2020 came, the day everyone remembers: the COVID shut-down. Classes went virtual. There was no more herbarium or vintage specimens or lectures in the cozy classroom. The rest of my plant education happened on Teams using the church basement Wi-Fi. I still loved studying plants without the glamour and the aesthetics, and I knew this was the career field for me.
I wasn't outdoorsy before-- outsidey, maybe. I enjoyed walks and reading outside and the occasional dip in the creek to catch a frog. But I was interested in the world around me now and vowed to be a better naturalist. I spent more time outside that summer than I ever have, planning and planting a garden, doing yardwork for my parents (I couldn't have a job with COVID going around), and teaching myself about the plants around me. I went backpacking for the first time at Lost River with Dad and the boys. I signed up for more natural resource classes than medical ones.
Journal V: 2.1.2021
"My plant ecology professor sent out an email about a summer research opportunity with Dr. P, and I can't think of anything I want more."
2.4.2021
"I leapt into an email to Dr. P inquiring about the summer research application. I doubt I'll qualify, but there's nothing I want more at the moment. I went ahead and banged out a draft of my personal statement, then spent the evening looking through the summer's pressed flowers I'd forgotten exist."
3.8.2021
"I got in. I really got in. It doesn't feel real. I get to work with Dr. P all summer. The email came today from the program coordinator. 'Dr. P has expressed interest in you working in her lab this summer.' She expressed interest? She remembered who I was? She wants me? Is it real?
Well, after being pre-med annoying for so long, it's time to be scientist annoying."
5.1.2021
[At a friend's bridal shower] "We talked about my new career ideas and my summer research. 'That sounds so much more like you than physician assistant,' she said. It does."
6.1.2021
"I met Dr. P at her lab in the science building at 9:30.... The student Zoom meeting was my favorite. Our fleet of 30-some Gen Z scientists was something to behold. We are the future.....
Brittany's closing words were encouraging: 'There's no room for imposter syndrome here. You were all chosen for this. You all deserve to be here. You are all scientists.'"
6.7.2021
"Dr. P taught me the basics of properly pipetting today. She gave me a lab coat, and I felt like a Greek champion being crowned with a laurel."
6.9.2021
"Dr. P taught me how to run gel electrophoresis today and how to quantify DNA with the Qubit. She liked my pictorial notes as well, so she had me copy them to laminate and use for teaching future students."
6.11.2021
"It was a dark, stormy summer day. I attended the Zoom meeting from the herbarium, watching thick clouds gather over the river behind the engineering building. I felt very dark academia."
We went to a conference in Lafayette, Louisiana together where I finally got to meet all the other students doing the same program at other universities. I still talk to some of them today in 2025. We all presented posters and went everywhere as a pack that weekend. I tried my first sip of alcohol at an outdoor bar. We piled too many people into the back of the only car to drive back to our hotel that night. It felt like the college experience I'd been robbed of by evangelical rules and COVID, and I wished it could last.
I didn't write much my senior year of college. I didn't have time. I was mid-deconstruction and quit Cru. A combination of a new asshole of a band director and the fact that my good band friends had graduated made me quit marching band, too.
It was just me and the herbarium ghost and the turtles that year. Pam and Jayme found funds to have a museum technician start cleaning up the mess old tenured professors left in the herpetology collections and herbarium. They picked me for the job. I spent ten hours a week decluttering the herbarium and filling jars of dead herps with ethanol. (I lost my appetite so badly each time I opened a specimen jar that I barely ate for the first month. I couldn't eat anything pickled for a year.)
Journal VI: 10.28.21
"This has been one of the loneliest semesters of my life, but I've packed it so full of busyness I haven't had time to notice the crushing weight of losing all my friends and support system. I'm taking a full 14 hours and working for Aunt Leslee at the shop and working in the herbarium for Pam and in the herpetology collections with Dr. W. There are no spare moments, and I wouldn't have time to meet up with friends even if I had them."
11.1.21
"He [Dad] asked how school was. 'That doesn't sound like a fun semester. Have you given more thought to next year ideas?'
'Every waking moment.'
'What kinds of things have you considered?'
'Everything.' I wanted him to read between the lines and know that I didn't know how to convey the overwhelmingness that answer encompassed and that I wasn't trying to be dismissive. He understood. He always does. We're so similar.
'Sometimes a break form academics and doing real world stuff helps give some focus. I did that myself.'
'Yes but most of the biology and botany jobs are out west.'
'That actually sounds pretty exciting. I loved my time in Montana... learned a lot about life in general and gained new perspectives on people. We'd miss you terribly, but understand the need to explore the world. Kinda miss the exploring myself.'"
The spring semester was worse. I had all the same responsibilities plus my capstone project, a job to line up for my post-graduation self, and a general sense of dread with the not knowing where I would be in six months. Who the hell had I been in 2020 thinking I could just "do botany?" It was so much more complicated. Dr. A told us about the S_cientists in P_arks program, and I applied to the limit (5.) I got responses back from two: Mammoth Caves, KY and Washington, D.C.
2.6.2022
"The first interview went horribly... but I don't think it was my fault, for once, that the call was so awkward. 'This interview is going to sounds scripted because it is. We have 12 questions for you to respond to and we're going to try to stick to those so that each applicant has a similar and fair interview experience.'... It was uncomfortable and un-conversational and I hated every moment.
The interview for Mammoth Caves was much better. Bill said he wanted the interview to sound like a conversation, and it did. I spoke with him and Clare for the full hour, trading tidbits about each other and Appalachia and mutual love for botany. Bill seems like a true old southern gent, and Clare is someone I could easily see myself working with."
2.9.2022
"'Well, don't worry if you don't hear from us next week. It doesn't mean you didn't get the position.' Well I'm starting to worry, Bill. I shouldn't have let myself dream about this summer job. I have a feeling that I'm going to be completely devastated."
9.3.2022
"I was completely devastated. I didn't get the position. That was the last I heard from them until the SIP program sent out official rejection emails in March....
February was cold and bitter... My museum jobs were particularly cozy then, working among the tall cabinets and shelves until the light faded from the big herbarium windows, surrounded by pictures of learned dead and the books and letters and records they kept. I became even more sure of the existence of a Herbarium Ghost and spoke to him on the regular. I scanned page after page of Green and Pauley letters. I decluttered the mounting room and found labels for unmounted collections in the worn field journals of the recently departed Evans. [I haven't forgiven the man for a) leaving such a mess and b) dying just before I could meet him.] I found all sorts of vintage treasures that brought me surges of joy: old microscopes with brass knobs, a typewriter with spellcheck, a coconut that was sent to Dan in the mail like a postcard, old restaurant menus, carefully constructed student projects, glass dropper bottles of microscopy supplies old camping and forestry gear, antiquated maps, cigar boxes storing old seeds, poison darts from Ecuador, photos from all over central America. My favorite was a collection of local herbarium scrapbooks from the early 20th century with yellowed pages and guilded covers. I even found a gradebook from Spring 1994 with Daddy's name in it under PLT TAX: final grade-- A.
Jayme got a good grad student, Anna, who took over my inexperienced care of the live herpetology collection. I was glad the herps were being properly cared for, and I still stopped to talk to them each day....
March was a time of focus and long walks in Ritter Park as I tried to work ahead and set myself up for success in the hectic month of April....
April-- the month of panic and graduation....
I turned in my keys to the COS Secretary. Lisa seemed peppier than usual, perhaps enthralled with the knowledge that she won't have to let me in somewhere I've gotten locked out of ever again.
On my last day on campus, I said goodbye to all the things that felt sentient: the Herbarium Ghost, the science building roaches, Dan's picture, the turtles and snakes in the herp office, the spirit in Green's letters, the parking lot chicken. I gave Pam my gift-- 'Keep in touch,' she said. 'You'll always have a home here.'"
I know.
