Dreams come true,
if you dare to pursue it

Hunting, camping, and fishing with my dad when I was younger up till now. Everywhere I went it was always outside. It didn't matter if it was sunny rainy or windy you could find me crouched down in some dirt. I was never afraid to touch anything I saw and still aren’t. Caddisfly larvae live in the bottom of running streams up in the mountains. They cover themselves with pine leaves and small stones and hide away. Hiding, caddisfly larvae was me in the city when I got older. In elementary school, I would run with all the kids play with all the bugs, and get dirty. Middle school was different. Girls, they didn’t want to get dirty they wanted to stay clean and neat. I liked getting dirty and bugs dirt or spiders didn’t scare me.

I never had friends in middle school because I never dared to. I was scared if people thought I was weird. Most kids in my class were interested in the new video games, new trends, new shoes, and social media. To be honest I probably would’ve also but I didn’t even have a phone till I was 16 when I earned money from a job to finally get one. In middle school, I read poetry, collected bugs in plastic containers, and sketched them. I go fishing on the weekends on some school breaks, and I go camping for long periods. Sometimes I would go crabbing or go to mud banks where the mud would go to my mid stomach and sink my arms in all the way to catch the crawfish that would run away, and I loved it. It was my getaway. There I never walked with my head down low to avoid eye contact. There I never talked low to avoid attention. I was free.

The smell of pines, the sound of pinecones falling, the crunch with every step I took, and the sounds of squirrels and birds. That’s where I was and I wasn’t scared of anything there. Then my dad had a stroke during my eighth-grade year and Codvid hit. I wasn’t allowed to go outside and my dad was too ill to go anywhere. I was stuck in the house all day watching my siblings while my mom stayed with my dad at the hospital. I was bored out of my mind. The smell of chicken porridge and kids running back and forth screaming I was tired of it.
High school started, In my sophomore year I was put in an agriculture academy class currently taking my third year. It was the best thing that happened to me. I was able to interact with kids who had the same interests as me. In my second year in the academy, I had the chance to take on an internship with the Center for Land-based Learning. I took the opportunity while during the summer of the internship, I was in the car with My agriculture teacher on the way to visit a different high school garden. On the way I was spewing facts about bugs that I didn’t even try to remember its just something that naturally adapted. Mid-sentence about cave glow worms my Teacher says “Have you ever thought about entomology.” I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I did some research and I loved it. I already did research on insects inside my school's garden. When the okra was getting swarmed by bees. I learned that okra produces a sticky substance that contains carbohydrates and amino acids key to a bee's survival and a few other bug projects including native bees and milkweed beetles. While I learned about entomology I found out most young adults don’t study or have an interest in entomology.

That was because some didn’t have the courage to pursue it. When they think about it they think of deadly diseases or poisonous insects and they’re not wrong. To me there’s a phenomenal world of insects, insect extinction would be the end of the world. The world I grew up around and I developed a passion to be one of the few entomologists to help the world thrive.