A post where I look back at my former scholastic pursuits.

I had a rather crappy day at work yesterday. Well, it wasn't crappy all together, let's just say I have a major thorn in my side that was really prickly yesterday. The nice thing about my job is that I can spend seventy-five minutes with the thorn poking into me, but that's followed by my grade nines who have turned into a lovely bunch of people. They are very sweet, and were a great remedy for the thorn.

After school, I had booked myself a hair appointment that I almost didn't make because of the thorn. However, I made it, and on the way back, I passed by good old U of T. As I was walking by the south end of the campus, I thought about how I worked my ass off for five years at that school for what? To deal with thorns? However, then I thought about my grade nines, and all of the other things that I love about my job, and I realized they all outweighed the thorn and made my job more than worthwhile.

I wrote the post below eons ago during a sleepless night in my old bedroom at the 'rents in St. Ratford. I came across it as I was doing some hard drive organization this past break, and thought that I'll post it one day. Walking by U of T made me think of it, and how I really miss being a student. Those were fun days. So I'll post it now.

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Every few trips to Stratford, I’ll drag out the folders of university essays/tests/et cetra that are stored in folders in a Rubbermaid container.

Looking through these papers are a really nice reminder that even though I often feel that spending more than 6 years of my life teaching high school may being diminishing them, I used to possess some mighty fine book smarts. The hours that I’ve spent looking at many atrocious assignments have not been good for my brain.

Apparently my writing was once “beautiful” and “interesting”, although I think that applies more to essays of a scientific nature, and not pat-myself-on-the-back blog posts such as this one. (Although, if you can’t pat yourself on the back on your own blog, where can you?)

My academic background is a four year degree in biology at the University of Toronto. I didn’t have the need to focus my studies in one specific area; I took courses that interested me, or that were taught by profs that I liked, or got positive reviews in the Anti-Calendar. Hence, I took courses in botany, zoology, evolution, animal behaviour, and anthropology. Not to mention the standard physics, chemistry, calculus, and statistics courses that are the required torture of any science student. Although being slightly masochistic and nerdy, I liked those courses. Since U of T wanted us to be well-rounded or something like that, I also took a Greek/Roman mythology course to fulfill my humanities requirement. And, in fourth year when I clued in that I could sneak in a bird course or two (not an actual ornithology course, that sadly didn’t fit my schedule), so I took a course in the World of Popular Music.

Anyway, I love to flip through my old university work that I no longer understand. It’s mind-boggling to consider the following:

- I wrote a 17 page paper on “Genetic and Environmental Influences on Population Trends of Non-Insulin Dependent Diabetes”

- That in a mammalogy lab exam, I was to identify that specimen A belonged to the family Vombatidae, specimen B was from Phalangeridae, and specimen C was from Macropodidae.

- I wrote a 14 page paper on taxol biosynthesis. This is actually quite interesting in theory, since taxol is a compound derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree that has anti-cancer properties. However, less interesting is that: “the first, very slow, committed step of taxol biosynthesis is the cyclization of geranylgeranyl diphosphate to taxa-4(5), 11(12)-diene”. More interesting is that I used to understand what that meant.

- I wrote 11 pages on fungi as parasites. My fungi professor totally dug it, because it was about his favourite topic: fungi, of course.

- I wrote a 12 page paper called “Linking the physiology and evolution of senescence: the disposable soma theory” where I took the bold stance that the disposable soma theory is the most compelling theory of the evolution of aging. Whoa.

- On a macroevolution exam, I correctly was able to use additive binary matrices (huh?) and all kinds of pretty-looking tree diagrams to correctly identify that the general pattern of an area cladogram is vicariance. Yeah, I don’t understand what any of that means either.

- I was able to use a goodness of fit test to assess if data follows a Poisson distribution. I’m pretty sure that has nothing to do with fish…

I am glad that I had the brains to save all of this stuff that proves that I did, at one point in my life at least, have some brains. I’m pretty sure if I was able to put my mind to writing 14 pages on taxol biosynthesis in the past, I surely can put my mind to anything. It’s just a matter of believing in myself.