Sometime last year, I stopped thinking of college as school.

School is something stagnant. It’s objective; everything seems to have a right answer or a wrong answer, regardless of subject matter. The canon for school has been long-established, and oftentimes it appears as though it has remained unchanged for decades. When I was studying in school, I knew I was acquiring a certain pre-determined skillset that I would need for my future education, but it didn’t feel like that, at the time.

Last year, I started working in a biomechanics lab. I’m currently in a program that helps agricultural and environmental science students find research opportunities on campus, and I was lucky enough to be assigned to a group that focuses on my preferred field: entomology. Meeting at the intersection of physics and animal behavior, my lab concentrates on the decision-making processes behind insect flight by analyzing the mechanics of movement.

But there is a problem. Working in a biomechanics lab can be difficult, especially when you’ve never taken a physics class in your entire life.

“Imagine that the bee thorax is an egg,” my lab manager, Susie, told me, after I read an introductory paper on how bumblebees cope with turbulence. “It has three axes going through it. The three axes correspond to a different kind of rotation. Roll occurs along the front-to-back axis. Pitch occurs along the side-to-side axis. Yaw occurs along the vertical axis. Does that make sense?”

It did not make sense.

The solution would be to take a physics course – but I had already solidified my class schedules for the next two years and university-taught physics wasn’t in my foreseeable future. So, I used the resources on hand. I spoke more to Susie, I read more papers, and I piled the majority of my time into the behavioral aspect of my lab’s focus. And, soon enough, this concentration began to bleed over into school as well - if a topic in one of my classes crossed over with something from my lab, I automatically found myself perking up and paying more attention.

Because somewhere along the way, college ceased being school and started becoming my future – or, a taste of what my future could be like. The world around me – the people I met, the things I learned, the activities I participated in – stopped being just school and started being life.

Here is something fundamental about me: I hate change. At my very core, I am made of pure inertia. I like routine and pattern and things that make sense. Throughout high school I enjoyed how everything around me was stagnant and objective. It made sense and was comfortable. I was comfortable.

But college doesn’t make sense. Not all the time, at least. At first I hated that – but, after sitting in my lab reading papers and imagining the bee-thorax-turned-egg rolling and pitching and yawing in a vortex street, I realized: maybe I was okay with that. All I needed was more time, more guidance, more information, and I could probably figure it out.

College was my life now, and, if it was my life, then I had to start living it the way I wanted to. To do that, though, I had to overcome my inner inertia.

I started to evaluate myself a lot more as time passed in college. I thought more about the things I liked and the things I disliked. I embraced new ideas that I came across in my studies and in my conversations with my peers.

College began to feel more like a free space for me. It was so different being away from home – here, without judgement or restriction, I could just sit and let ideas and thoughts permeate into my mind. It may not seem like it to my family, but since leaving high school, my life has become more freeform, more fluid, more dynamic – and despite all the rough amorphous-ness of the space I now occupy, I feel alive.

When I read my old college application essays, I feel like my past self was soulless. I sound very idealistic and whimsical – and I still am idealistic and whimsical, to a degree – but I also sound pompous, like I am in love with the thought of my own static self. And it isn’t to say that that’s bad, but I feel like I have become so much more myself since my first quarter in college. I am not the person who wrote those essays now. I am no longer under the watchful guise of my parents or my sometimes-judgmental peers. Now the only thing against me is my own internal resistance – a side of me that I still I struggle to interact and communicate with.

I try to keep this in mind: Why be a rock in the stream when you can be the water moving around it? It’s the stream that’s actually going places, right?

I love college – I don’t speak for everyone when I say that, but it is my personal truth. I love learning and I love my school, and I can finally say that I know all three axes of rotation in a bumblebee. The world around me continues to change, but I now know that I can just as easily change with it.

UC application freshman prompt and all applicants prompt — accepted, UC Davis