TAKING A NON-LINEAR PATH

My journey to geoscience was via failure, followed by the process of elimination; I wasn’t good enough at playing the French Horn to get into the Oberlin College Music Conservatory. I tried and failed twice and decided to try to stay connected to music, so ethnomusicology sounded interesting. That led me to anthropology, then sociology, and ultimately to the conclusion that social science was too subjective. Physical science was the answer for me. My process of elimination went like this: biology? No. I can’t remember names and I didn’t enjoy dissecting frogs and worms in junior high. Chemistry? No, but not emphatically. The idea of spending my days inside a laboratory mixing things up didn’t appeal to me. Physics? Too scary! Geology was all that was left. The only thing I knew about it was that you could spend time outdoors to do your research. Since I loved outdoor activities, that was all I needed to solidify my choice. That was just the beginning of an entire career of non-direct paths. I took longer to finish my Bachelor’s degree because my family couldn’t really afford Oberlin College tuition. To make a long story short, I attended school, withdrew to work for a while, re-enrolled in school to finish my undergraduate studies, applied for graduate school at Johns Hopkins University – again, twice – but I did gain admission on my second try this time, completed my PhD (after giving birth to my first child), started my career at the USGS in Denver, got married, and started what became a multi-decade 2-body problem that resulted in either me or my medical physicist husband dragging the family around the country (and the world) while we attempted to find reasonable employment for both of us in the same city. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was often a fairly bumpy ride, but most of the time we seemed to at least find a partial 2-body solution. Because my second child turned out to be quite musically talented at playing the double-bass, I returned to music when I picked up the French Horn again so I could play in community orchestras with him, doing that for fun wherever we lived until the covid-19 pandemic shut down our rehearsals. It was a great way to provide some balance between my work life and family life, forcing me to take time to stop thinking about the next science “thing”. If there is anything I would tell my younger self, it would be that it is okay if your path is not straight.