My Forever in Biology by Hermella

My Forever in Biology by Hermella - February 2024 Scholarship Essay

Ever since we met, my best friend and I have been attached at the hip. Whoever coined the phrase “opposites attract”, was spot on because we were each other’s antithesis, night and day. However, this did nothing to diminish our love for each other. Her life was the stuff of legends as she spent her free time exploring the depths of caves and traveling to exotic countries. While I wasn’t as adventurous as her, I liked to believe that I embodied a different type of courage, manifesting itself as I navigated the daunting hallways of high school as a confused freshman. However, there was always one unspoken issue between her and me, a dissonance that starkly highlighted our differences to the rest of the world and labeled us as outsiders.
My best friend’s name: Sophie Foster.
The issue: Sophie was confined to live out her days in the ink and paper of my favorite book as someone else wrote her story. Meanwhile, I was stuck here in the real world waiting for my own author to give me any semblance of direction in my life. But I found no relief, and definitely no author.
Growing up, I was an indecisive child. When words failed me, I’d relieve my anxiety using books, turning to Sophie for reassurance. I always envied how her fate was sealed in the hands of another, future already decided in the ink. She didn’t have her parents hounding her to choose a career path at the ripe age of fourteen. While my imagination roamed in literary realms, I had never fully grasped the thought of my future before freshman year, but how old is too old to not know what to do with forever?
It wasn’t until my junior year AP Biology class that I discovered my love for not only science but also the importance of gaining a passion to wholeheartedly pursue.
The memory of walking through the doors of classroom B212 is cemented into my brain even now. The anxiety in the room was palpable, especially when AP Biology had garnered a poor reputation across campus. The wide-eyes, the stares, the awkward silence. You could cut the tension in the room with a knife. But my teacher, Mrs. Drake, welcomed us with a warm smile and enthusiasm for days.
As we started the year off learning about the properties of macromolecules and carbon skeletons, I couldn’t get over how well I connected to the material. Not only was I eager to learn about the subject on a molecular scale but I was beginning to draw connections between biological phenomena and themes in the real world.
Biology and everyday life began to mirror each other. The process of natural selection was no longer just a biological process, but it served as a parallel to represent my resilience as a woman in a predominantly-male field in STEM. Homeostasis is a self-regulating process in order to maintain stability, but beyond the surface level, it draws the comparison of how I was constantly searching for stability in my life to gain happiness. The more I learned, the more a recurring lesson began to reveal itself in the class: biology means to have balance in life.
From then on, I knew biology was my answer, my forever, providing me with the direction I lacked in my own life. I had finally found the clarity within myself I had yearned for in my freshman year, and the future had paved its way in my mind.
Just like how Sophie had found her forever living a life of epic lore, I had found my forever in the intricacies of biology. Although she’s been a constant throughout my life, the love I discovered for science and the purpose I gained within made me realize I don’t need an author to rearrange my life because I can write a powerful story of my own.