Chapter 1 My last option

I’d imagine that most people have some sort of a plan before they enter university. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate plan; it could be as straightforward as “when I finish my undergraduate degree, I want to work for a company and work my way up from there!” I had no plan. Picking what degree to enrol in consisted of my mum and I looking through the course catalogue and picking something that was not business-related. In her mind, a business degree is useless because having started her own successful fast food business, she believes that doing business is just common sense. We decided on a Bachelor of Science degree, just because. And we never seriously considered what I was going to do after I graduated. You may be reading this and thinking what kind of a person spends a fortune paying for university (barely affording it) without considering the potential upsides? Well, have you ever read about some scam and found asking yourself who would ever fall for such a scheme? It’s always the people who don’t know any better.

I got into university as a first-generation student and I didn’t do very well but I managed to graduate. I don’t want to make up excuses for my mediocre grades, so I’ll just say it was because I didn’t work very hard, which is true. My mediocre grades and complete lack of confidence was a problem when it came to finding a lab for an honours degree. To those not familiar with the undergraduate system in Australia (and don’t want to read the Wikipedia article I linked), an honours degree is a one year (in practice, it’s about ten months) undergraduate research program you can take after your Bachelor’s degree and has nothing to do with the traditional meaning of the word “honours”. You can consider it as a shortened Master’s degree and if you do well enough, you can actually commence a PhD, which is what a lot of people do. I wanted to do a honours degree because it provides some practical experience, which would help me find a job, and it would also potentially qualify me to enter a PhD program.

I majored in biochemistry and microbiology for my Bachelor of Science degree. I emailed a handful of professors in the school of biochemistry in total. The first two said that they couldn’t accommodate additional students. The next asked for my grades and told me their lab only accepted students with a GPA of 6.5 or higher (7 is the highest), so that was a no. I managed to get a meeting with the next professor but he wasn’t impressed with my grades, especially the grade I got for his class. I had one last meeting and it was with a bioinformatics lab working on phylogenetics. It was my last shot.

I still remember the meeting I had with Mark and Rob (Mark’s new postdoc). Out of all my subjects, the best grade I got was for a course called Genomics and Bioinformatics (BIOL3004). I didn’t work especially harder for this subject so perhaps it was a sign that that’s where my skills are at. I milked it for all it was worth to Mark and Rob since the rest of my grades were rubbish. They worked on microbial phylogenetics, so I also mentioned my microbiology major. In the end, it all came down to a single question. Mark asked Rob whether he had the time to supervise me because he didn’t. I stared at Rob and was probably holding my breath. And he casually said “Yeah”.