As the sweet scent of spring began to roll through the horizon, complete with singing birds and rays of sunshine, one thought began to plague my mind – the mythically infamous summer between junior and senior year, expected to be crammed with internships, research projects, and experiences life-changing enough to write about in college essays.

        I sat for hours in my room trying to find research projects for high school students, scrolling through applications, only to be stumped by one of the first questions:

“Please describe why you’re interested in this project.”

        Well, after conducting a quick Google search and skimming the first two lines on the Wikipedia page, I can genuinely say that bacterial ribosomal complexes completely changed my perspective on the world.

        Some variation of this haphazard declaration of passion would ensue every time I was asked that question.

As much as I wish that it was, sitting in a white room mining through nucleotide sequences isn’t how I envisioned potentially one of my last summers in the Bay Area. I love science, but I realized that spending two and a half months trying to wrap my head around some graduate student’s thesis project wouldn’t actually be that personally fulfilling.

And it took me a while to realize that that was okay. Viewing research at an impressive institution as the most august way to spend your summer is a pretty prevalent mindset in our community. But with such a diversity of talents amongst us, it shouldn’t necessarily be the only one.

We spend every school year in this grind, a perpetual scramble to finish homework and cram for the never-ending stream of tests; I think we owe it to ourselves to step back once a year and make, rather than find, time to do what we actually want.

Maybe travel, apply for a job, learn a new language, or even take a sky-diving class – the world has so much more to offer us than transcripts and internships, and it’s so easy to be blinded by the college-centric tunnel vision that often surrounds us.

That’s not to say that there aren’t minds in our midst that seem to thrive and literally find their elements in research. On the contrary, I think there’s a pretty high density of them at our school, but it’s that density that creates the impression that if you’re not doing research, you’re not on the right path. I really want to believe that there’s not just one “right path” to follow.

Maybe I’ll regret saying this in a few months when I’m trying to fill out college applications, but for now, I just want to live in the moment and see what happens.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on May 16, 2014.