I plan to go to graduate school for Biology, become an endocrinologist and a geneticist and dedicate my life to solving that complex, nagging riddle/elephant in the room that we all fail to acknowledge: Death.

It sounds like I have a lot on my plate. Maybe I’ve bit off more than I can chew, but that’s okay.

Speaking of biting off more than I can chew, this semester I learned a lot about life, school and the very limits of academic sponge aka brain.

In the summer, I scored a nice job as a medical scribe and when the semester began, I started taking 27 units, 18 at CSUSM. Another 12 of my units were an EMT class, a nutrition class and an anatomy class at Palomar. It was very tiring, especially with the 9 p.m. – 5 a.m. shifts in the emergency department. After giving up my scribe position, I thought I could hold onto the high academic volume. Sadly, I had to drop those extra classes five weeks later.

I overdid it. I know I did. I felt inadequate compared to other science majors and tried to make up for the unscientific background. I tried to make myself more of a competitor for medical school.

I was never really into school before until I around 19 years old and had even dropped out for a semester in order to do triathlons. I went back to school with my dad’s encouragement and after a mechanic at one of the races told me that a lot of professional triathletes didn’t race for fun, but instead were always struggling to feed their families. . The 130 miles per week of training probably spurred some brain cells, because I gave up my Olympic dream and found myself as an English major.

Here’s what I’ve learned near the end of the semester that I want to pass onto you. Life, especially academic life, is not a race. I’m not going to get rewarded for zooming on by. Academic exhaustion is different from physical exhaustion. When I dropped those three classes and my crazy job, I found that my intellectual prowess returning as well.

School is not everything. Sure, we need an education to get those paying jobs, but there is a school out there that won’t judge you so harshly if you didn’t get an 3,000,000.0 GPA.

My past is not my present and is absolutely not my future.

My English and anthropology background gave me the ability to write, to think and also, something that is lacking in this world: to feel. I took a break from biology as an immature dweeb who didn’t know what he wanted in life; I came back to it, obsessed and reawakened with aptitude and passion ‒ a phoenix (maybe self-regenerating starfish).