Lilly

It is a rare occasion—I am in a room in a science building on a big university campus near my own college, and everyone with me is a woman. “I’m a fifth-year grad student,” says someone at my table, and after I introduce myself she exclaims, “A freshman?” The panelists introduce themselves and one by one lists of their extensive accomplishments flash by on the projector. I am impressed, curious, intimidated. Mostly intimidated, I realize as the night goes on. Other undergraduates ask questions about getting internships at NASA and extensive research opportunities and I think that as silly as it sounds, sometimes I have to remind myself that this isn’t high school anymore. This is my adult life, and it is what I make of it, and what if I don’t have the drive? What if I’m not outgoing enough? What am I going to do?

I spend the next 18 hours with a live wire running through my bones, hardly able to focus in my physics lab the next morning, ironically enough, and finally retreating to a corner of the science building on campus to try to channel some of this nervous energy into my homework. It’s quiet for a while, everyone else at lunch or in labs of their own, when I hear footsteps and look up and find my astronomy professor heading straight for me.

I freeze, because I’ve been biting my nails since leaving the panel last night over how to email him and ask about research opportunities and the physics major—he’s not my advisor yet! Would it be awkward?!—but all he says is, “How was the exam yesterday?”

Right. Thanks for the reminder. “It was…OK,” I say. It’s not a lie. It was OK.

“Do you think you did well?” he asks.

“I got blindsided by a couple questions,” I tell him honestly. “But for the most part, yes, I think so.”

“Well,” he says. “I wouldn’t worry. You did very well. You have one of the best grades in the class.”

He sees my physics textbook and asks me what other classes I’m taking. “I’m guessing that physics class is excruciatingly boring for you,” he says, and I can’t tell him it’s not, not when the last time I did kinematics like this was in September, two years ago. He also says, “Come talk to me sometime and we’ll see what we can do about skipping you out of the next semester of the astronomy sequence.” He also says, “There’s an event in November, we do it every year—about summer research, for students who are interested.”

I don’t want to get my hopes up. I thank him, and mark my calendar for that event in November, and allow myself not to hope, but to speculate. Because if I’ve learned anything in my classes this year, it’s that I really think this is what I want to do with my life. Even if it means five years of grad school and who knows what beyond that. Even if it means putting myself out there, being an adult, relying on discipline instead of drive. I want to be the physics teaching assistant with office hours five nights a week, and the cool astronomy major who runs the observatory on public nights, and the grad student with a shabby apartment and years of research under her belt, and the electrical engineer with a past NASA job on her résumé. And all that will not be easy, but that doesn’t deter me anymore. ♦