What if? Musings of a career scientist on the path not taken

What if I'd chosen my first love – books and stories, over hypotheses and experiments?

Ever wonder what your life might have been if you'd taken a completely different career path?

I've been an academic scientist now for over 20 years and my career is challenging and rewarding. Perhaps it was being promoted to full professor at my institution a few years ago that allowed me to finally raise my head and look around for the first time in decades. I'm wondering what else I might have done with my life. Would I have been good at something else? Did I miss my true calling? Or did I somehow luck into what I was meant to do all those years ago as a young co-ed?

We make grand decisions about our futures at 18, 19 years old - where to go to school, what major to study, how much debt we take on (which impacts all future career decisions) with so little awareness of how our choices will impact our lives. We make these choices with optimism, hope and naiveté - and perhaps that is how it should be. Maybe that is what we need to start the long climb towards career success. Wisdom and perspective, the sort you gain after 20 years in a profession, would likely only muddy the waters.

Lately I've been wondering, what if I hadn't chosen science and research all those years ago.

My first love was books. The first book I remember loving was Anne of Green Gables. Soon after there was Little Women, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Gone with the Wind. In high school I discovered Gatsby, the Grapes of Wrath and The Sun Also Rises. Now, I feel out of sorts if I'm not reading something, and usually have at least two books going at any given time. I make the time to read because I must.

I’ve also been writing for as long as I can remember. I kept a diary as early as second grade and filled one journal after another from my teens through my 30s. Around the time I had kids, I started a blog to chronicle my thoughts on motherhood and the big and small stuff of family life. I took my first creative writing class in high school and another one in college.

Despite my early love for reading and writing, I chose science as my career path. I often wonder what forces were at work behind that choice. I had fantastic science teachers in high school who challenged me. It was important to me that I be seen as smart and to be taken seriously. I was driven, independent, determined to prove (to whom?) that I was capable and could be anything I chose. Science sounded hard, ambitious.

In college I quickly decided to major in chemistry and made plans to go to medical or graduate school. I never really questioned whether that was the right fit for me, even after I had a fortuitous detour that put me nose to book for one fabulous year.

I was on the club rowing team in college and thanks to Title IX, women’s rowing was made a varsity sport at the University of Kansas with the first season scheduled to start the year after I graduated. The club coach was promoted to coach the varsity team and he asked a group of seniors to stay an extra year and help start the new program. I’d already graduated with my chemistry degree and so decided to add a degree in English Literature in that one year. It was a dream year and I still count it as one of the best decisions I ever made (right up there with taking a research fellowship in Florence, Italy - the subject of my memoir work in progress). Morning rowing practice followed by classes like 18th Century British Writers, Southern Women Writers, Creative Writing and Shakespeare. More workouts in the afternoon and then my evenings were spent with Chaucer, Poe, and Dickens. Faulkner, Salinger, O’Conner and Welty occupied every moment not spent on the water.

Following my blissful year of rowing, reading and writing, I applied to graduate programs in the sciences. I never once looked into a graduate program in English or considered an MFA. Science felt solid, safe, a sure path compared to the unknowns of the creative world. Books were my love, but they would not be my career. I was raised in a small town in the Midwest, my parents were practical and extremely grounded. I didn’t know anyone that was a journalist or that worked in book publishing. I didn’t have the imagination or courage to envision other career options.

When I look back on the various stages of my science career, I see them as a series of challenges - from graduate school to postdoctoral fellowships and finally a faculty position. Each step on the ladder required hard work, goal setting, striving - I put one foot in front of the other and had great mentors along the way. I’m not so sure I was (am) a natural scientist so much as a high achiever plunked down in the path of a science career.

I came close to a career change while I was a postdoctoral fellow. I was discouraged and disenchanted with the grind of failed experiments at a large medical center. I felt confused and overlooked and couldn’t see my way forward. I considered using my PhD to be a science writer and took an online writing class. I ventured into a writing community and was actively pitching articles and searching for jobs. Then a faculty position at the medical center close to home came open and I applied. I was motivated more by wanting to be close to home and family after 10 years of living away than I was by dreams of an academic career. I was so uncertain that an academic faculty position was what I wanted that I only applied for that one job — still the only academic job I have ever applied for. I took the position, set all the goals and climbed the ladder to full Professor.

All my choices that led me to the here and now were intentional and I have no regrets. I have an amazing and rewarding career that exceeded my greatest expectations. My devotion to exercise and health research has afforded me the privilege of world travel, continuous learning, and working with amazing colleagues at my institution and across the country.

Perhaps I was one of the fortunate ones that figured it out on the first try and I am where I'm meant to be. But I also wonder if I ended up where I am because I never gave serious consideration to what else I might enjoy, to what else I might be good at.

I wonder what my life might have been had I followed my heart and not my head - if I had chosen what I perceived then as the shaky path over the steady, if I had chosen books and stories over hypotheses and experiments?

I wonder, what if?