I enjoy elaborate jokes. Sure, knock-knock jokes are okay, but I’m a sucker for those jokes whose setups are so elaborate, so convoluted, so ingenious, that you know the punchline will be worth the wait.
Last November, I wrote a post about how God, the Holy Jokester, used my fruitless job hunt to set up a winning punchline: a biologist with a desk job at a publishing house. Little did I know, God was just getting warmed up.
When I graduated in May ’13, I thought I wanted to be a gritty, dirt-under-the-fingernails ecologist. I imagined tramping through the woods with a water-stained notebook, decked out in plaid flannel and sturdy boots. I’d chain myself to bulldozers, shut down factory farms, and learn every wildflower in the book.
I knew straight out of the gate that rugged ecologists need graduate degrees, probably something in conservation ecology or wildlife biology. Without a master’s degree, I’d be lucky to get a job pulling weeds in a county park. But still I dithered. Because I also wanted to write.
Secretly, I dreamed of being a scientific translator, turning data and research results into something accessible and useful to scientists and laypeople alike. I’d gotten a taste of this at Calvin, publishing articles for the Chimes science-and-technology page and taking a class on environmental literature. During junior year, when scheduling conflicts had set me off track from my cohort of biology classmates, I took the sophomore research course as an independent study a year late. My friends had spent their semester slogging heroically through rain-swollen streams to gather data. What did I do? I sat in my apartment, happy as a clam, melding all their data-dense final papers into one concise report, a summary that could help future students get up to speed on the research performed by their predecessors.
Looking back, that independent study should have been a clue. I chose dissemination over discovery, an armchair and laptop instead of rubber waders and test tubes. God must have raised his eyebrows, wondering if I was going to catch on.
Nope. I dug in my heels, clutching my dream of that noble backwoods ecologist. I decided to put off applying to grad school until the perfect program rolled around, one that would marry my ecological dreams with my wish to write. I told myself: you’ll know it when you see it.
Last fall, when I finally threw up my hands and let God steer, he came through with that temporary job at Zondervan publishers. By March, as my Zondervan projects began winding down, I knew I couldn’t stall on grad school much longer. I begged God to point me toward the right program and give me a good, hard shove. Here we go again, God, I prayed. I’m still stuck. You’ll have to make my next step so stupidly obvious that even a dingbat like me couldn’t miss it.
God rapped my forehead with a knuckle. Anybody in there? Do you get it yet? No? Look at your laptop screen.
I glanced down. I’d been looking up the University of Michigan conservation ecology program. There, in the next tab: environmental policy. Then the penny dropped, the other shoe hit, the first domino toppled. I finally got the punchline.
Of course.
Environmental policy fit. Looking back, it has always fit. I loved the idea of being a noble ecologist frolicking through the woods, but my strengths lie with words and people, not data tables and live traps. Environmental policy reaches into government, business, and non-profit sectors across the world. I’ll be able to engage with real-time science and relay it back to people outside scientific circles. And, hey—if I pick the right policy job, I might still be able to wear plaid flannel to work.
I sat back, dumbfounded, as these realizations came trickling in. I felt a little sheepish that it took so long for me to figure it out. God got a well-deserved slow clap.
Things moved quickly after that: I applied to the University of Michigan environmental policy program in April, got accepted in May, and found a summer job in June. A week from today, I’ll be unpacking bins and boxes in my Ann Arbor rental house, settling in for the unknown.
Looking back at the last year, I’m glad God made me sit through his elaborate wind-up. While I waited, I met new friends, learned Photoshop, got in shape, played the piano, read good books, spent time with my family. And when the punchline finally, finally rolled around, I could appreciate it even more.
Geneva Langeland (’13) survived graduate school with minimal blood loss, escaping with her ms in environmental policy and communication. She now works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the communications editor at Michigan Sea Grant. There, she gets to hang out with educators, researchers, and communicators who love the Great Lakes as much as she does.
