Do you ever look back and find yourself amazed by the unlikely nature of how you ended up where you are today?

Sometimes it’s easy to overlook just how many decisions, relationships, and random opportunities seized have led me to this moment, writing this blog post for Scripps College in Claremont, California. It’s especially easy to forget that this will continue to be the case– that in five or ten years, it is almost certain that I will be somewhere doing something that I can’t in any way predict or expect.

The truth is that as much as I plan, prepare, and schedule, life is totally unpredictable. There hasn’t been a single point in my life where I’ve known on a big picture scale exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing. That is to say, I might have an idea of where I want to be in a few months, or a few years, but I’ve never truly known where my current decisions are going to lead me in the long run. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve come to realize that this unpredictability is okay.

The crazy thing is that even despite the unpredictable nature of our college years and early 20s, we still have to keep moving in some direction. Somehow the planning, preparing, and scheduling is still important, even though in the end it might not get us exactly where we thought it would.

As a senior, looking back on the past four or five years since I began applying to colleges, this fact is especially apparent.

Five years ago, I was obsessed with running cross country and pursuing my dream to go to medical school and become a pediatrician. But upon coming to college all of that quickly changed. College-level cross country didn’t fit into my life the way it had in high school, and for a lot of different reasons, I decided that the pre-med track wasn’t going to work for me.

But instead of letting these changes in my plans sideline me, I just kept trying new things. (Or, as the TomToms of yesteryear would say ever-so-annoyingly “Recalculating route.”)

TomTom, you know my life so well.

For a while I tried out psychology, thinking that instead of becoming a pediatrician, I could be a child psychologist. I realized the academic side of psych wasn’t really my thing.

Then I applied for a summer internship teaching middle-schoolers, thinking that I would like education. That definitely wasn’t my thing.

It turns out that I found my academic niche right in front of my eyes, in the life sciences. It was second semester intro-bio, when we were taught ecology and conservation biology, that I realized I had found something academic I felt passionate about. Not knowing what career direction it would lead me in, I pursued that passion. I began to spend time working with my biology professor at the Bernard Field Station (BFS). Spending time collecting data out in the field early on Saturday mornings reminded me of what I had loved about cross country- it took me outdoors, and allowed me to focus on one task with an intensity akin to meditation. After that, I took every class I possibly could in the field of conservation biology.

At the same time, I was reading a lot of Barbara Kingsolver (most famous for her novel The Poisonwood Bible), who, it turns out, actually has a PhD. in Biology, and incorporates her knowledge of ecosystems and the environment into her gorgeous novels. I loved her books and admired her so much that when asked about my future plans, I began to half jokingly say that “I want to be Barbara Kingsolver.” All jokes aside, it turned out that something as simple as finding a new favorite author began to– once again– totally change my career path.

Once again for good measure

I have always loved writing. From the time I was in kindergarten up until high school, I constantly wrote stories and chapter books. I wanted to be an author “when I grew up.”

So as I realized what someone could do with a science degree and a passion for writing, I continued to recalculate my route. I started work at the Scripps Voice and started writing an environmental science column. I threw myself into my scientific research papers. Oddly, writing these academic reviews became my favorite part of the semester. Most significantly, I applied for and was granted a graduate research fellowship at Crater Lake National Park, which I knew would allow me to get published.

Over this past summer, I finally made the concrete decision to apply to graduate school in science writing. For the first time since high school, I know what I want to be doing in five years. But now I also know that there is a high likelihood that this plan will somehow change. Maybe I’ll go to graduate school, but end up in radio instead of writing. Maybe I won’t get into my top choice, and will end up somewhere else that I can’t currently anticipate. I won’t let this myriad of possibilities deter me from pursuing what I’d like to do right now, but I know that I’ll be better equipped to accept unpredictability in the future when it arises. Because funnily enough, that has been the only predictable fact of my young adult life so far– it has been totally unpredictable.