Jaena Han
Kelp Forest
Sitting here facing a word document blank save for the words “Final Reflection” is far more intimidating than I imagined it would be. As both TSR and my senior year draw to a close, I can’t help but be struck by the way in which the growth and culmination of my project during this class so neatly encapsulates key aspects of my entire Stanford experience—and that’s what makes this reflection so difficult. I have a blank space to fill: about my work, about my life, about how I’ve grown in the past three quarters (four years) into someone I’m “proud to be.” These pages are not just a space just for The Senior Reflection, but rather a space for a senior’s reflection on the entirety of my time here at college. It’s a space that aches for fulfillment and closure, but even now I’m not quite certain whether that’s entirely possible.
When I was in high school, I admit my biggest dream was to attend a prestigious university. Cerebrally, I knew college was just a stepping-stone towards larger goals, but too often it felt like an end destination. Get into a good school, and life would just unfold before me, a yellow brick road towards inevitable success. When I was admitted to Stanford against all of my expectations, it felt as if that entire chain of fantasies were being realized. It felt like a gift from God.
Maybe that was the problem.
When I first read my acceptance letter, I was elated beyond words—but both then and years into my Stanford life, I never felt like I deserved it. Stanford was something bestowed upon me by a higher power—luck, God, circumstance, privilege—not something I had earned myself. I remember one of the speakers during New Student Orientation assuring the incoming class that we were all meant to be here and that the admissions committee had seen something special in every single of us. It was a rousing speech, to be sure, but there was always a small bitter part of me that scoffed at those words. After all, admissions officers were only human.
Still, with freshman bravado, I told myself over and over that even if I was a mistake, Stanford couldn’t exactly kick me out anymore. But when I found myself struggling in classes and watched my grades slip despite sacrificing my social life and extracurricular commitments one after the other at the altar of academia while the rest of campus seemed to sail along like ducks on still waters, that initial bitter sentiment ate away at me. I had written my application essay on the precedence of effort over innate talent, but as the years went on, my own words started to ring hollow. Maybe there were some obstacles I couldn’t overcome just by working hard. Maybe I didn’t belong here after all. I developed a rabid fear that even if the college administrators didn’t proactively eject me, natural selection would. Back then, I didn’t understand why wasn’t the perfect student everyone else seemed to be. Back then, I couldn’t accept that I was only human.
By the end of junior year, I was sure I was destined for failure. I’d been convinced that getting into Stanford would secure my future, but I hadn’t anticipated being unable to cope with the rigors of college education. After the seventh time I was rejected by a Stanford lab, I simply gave up and resigned myself to being that one ironic biology major who graduates from Stanford—a veritable hub of scientific intellect and opportunity—without a shred of on-campus research experience. No lab, no honors thesis, no capstone project. My prospects seemed bleak. I was pretty much running on empty when I came across Bio 196: The Senior Reflection in Biology.
Honestly, I signed up for the class on a whim. I love art and had made a point of taking at least two or three art classes every year in college, as a breather amidst the suffocating pressure of chemistry and physics prerequisites. Lo and behold, here was a class that merged art and science and might even soothe some of the acrid regret I felt over not pursuing an honor’s thesis. What did I have to lose?
Let’s flash back a little.
So far I’ve been making it sound as if my time at Stanford was filled with doom and gloom. Well, it wasn’t. As a staunch pessimist, any kind of retrospection on my part is destined to fixate on negative things (on good days I think of them as points for improvement) but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t also able to amass a wealth of amazing experiences and relationships throughout my four years here. Most of those are stories for another time, and another kind of reflection, but one in particular does have a large bearing on my TSR project.
One of the few goals I set for myself as an incoming freshman that I was actually able to achieve was to study abroad. During the fall of my junior year I spent a quarter in Australia as part of a heavily bio/humbio/earth-systems oriented program that involved shuttling from one location to the next every week or so in a frenzied dash to hit every major ecosystem on the east coast of the continent. It was the greatest experience of my college career—and perhaps of my entire life. Hiking through rainforests punctuated by waterfalls, strangler figs, and the occasional carpet python; snorkeling in crystal blue waters with sharks, turtles, and stingrays; documenting invertebrate life on beaches swarming with crabs; taking transects on fire-replenished sclerophyll forests—cliché as it sounds, every moment was filled with excitement and adventure. For the first time since coming to Stanford I was conducting science independently out in the field, working and discovering with my own hands rather than learning secondhand from a textbook or lecture. What’s more, in Australia, I was fully immersed in the ecosystems I studied, and the real-world applications of that work were always immediately apparent. I felt like I was re-engaging with the aspects of science I originally fell in love with: science as a personal endeavor towards greater understanding, and as a larger enterprise to benefit society.
Unfortunately, coming home from Australia was a bit like waking from a dream. Back among premeds and the pressure to excel, I once again started limiting my choices towards things that I felt were practical and achievable. I had come into science first through a love of nature and zoology, but under the influence of my biochemist parents and summer internships that had largely revolved around cellular/molecular topics, that interest had fallen by the wayside. Australia had rekindled that passion somewhat, but as I thought rationally about my future plans, I actively quashed it back down. So many aspects of science intrigued me, but I felt that growing up meant choosing one subject at the expense of all the others.
That’s why it was a surprise to me that I chose the topic that I did for my TSR project. Instead of a piece grounded in my previous research experience or my projected areas of graduate study, I chose to make a paper-cut illustration of kelp forest ecosystems. It was a project drawn from my neglected love of ecology and visceral memories of yearning to experience kelp forests as a child frequenting the beaches and aquariums of San Diego rather than from any analytical considerations by the intellectual scientist I was striving to be at Stanford. Australia, in some sense, had left a lasting impact after all. What’s more, in retrospect, the project idea was ridiculously ambitious and completely at odds with the rational and constrained attitude I normally took towards school assignments. I toned it down with vagaries when I first described it to others, but in my head I was determined to have three door-sized paper-cut tapestries depicting the fluctuating species compositions of kelp forests hanging free-form in Wallenberg by the end of the course.
Spoilers: I ended up with a single 2’x4’ pencil drawing of a kelp forest. I admit that the days before installation were filled with intense self-flagellation and regret—for not working hard enough, for not managing my time effectively, for latching onto an idea that I would never be able to actuate on time. Yet in the days following the exhibition, after I saw my work displayed and had time to reflect on the journey that had brought me there, I’ve came to rather different conclusions. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Looking back, the first quarter of the Senior Reflection was eerily similar to freshman year. The entire ten weeks was devoted to fleshing out a project (hopes and goals) and writing a grandiose and ambitious proposal (life plan) about it. I was already a jaded senior but suddenly I felt like I could do something amazing for this class. Three quarters (four years)? I practically had all the time in the world.
Following in that vein, my initial proposal was essentially a senior’s homage to freshman optimism. In quite florid language, I described elaborate ideas for how my paper-cut hangings would be created and displayed and waxed poetic about the scientific/environmental message they would convey. My milestones for the project timeline were absolutely ludicrous: I anticipated it would take me two weeks to finish a panel of the papercut (giving me ample time to finish three such sheets within a single quarter) when in reality a single panel ended up taking me more than ten weeks. Moreover, I based the entire premise of my project on the assumption that laser cutters were miracle machines that could instantly cut out any template I drew (as it turns out, they aren’t). Secretly, I even entertained fleeting fantasies about cutting out one of the panels by hand. Just thinking about it now makes my fingers cramp.
To put it mildly, trying to execute that project was hard. Aspects I hadn’t even considered like compiling a species list turned out to be difficult and time consuming, as were finding appropriate photo references and composing the illustration in a way that was artistically expressive yet also consistent with a broad framework of scientific truth. The worst was when my artistic mentor broke it to me that my drawing was too intricate to cut out on a PRL laser cutter within a reasonable timespan (i.e. the amount of time I could reserve the machine for use, given that it was heavily sought after by product design and mechanical engineering majors alike). It was a sobering realization, but by that time I had already begun to harbor doubts about the structural integrity of my design as a paper-cut. The way I was drawing my kelp forests, I suspected there wouldn’t be enough paper at key points to physically carry the weight of the entire piece, but I couldn’t seem to find a way to reinforce those areas without compromising the aesthetic flow of the composition. As winter quarter progressed, I had grown increasingly certain that I‘d have to sandwich the work between planes of glass instead of having the free-hanging piece I’d envisioned, but once the laser-cutter news dropped it seemed like I wasn’t going to have a paper-cut at all.
Given these hurdles, everyone around me recommended that I modify my idea and stick with a traditional drawing rather creating a template for a paper-cut, since that would both be faster (as I wouldn’t have to convert my starting sketches into something that could be cut out) and sidestep the structural/laser cutter problems entirely. But I was already so personally invested in the idea of my piece as a paper-cut embodying the fragile intricacy of ecosystems that I completely disregarded their advice. I would have my paper-cut somehow or die in the attempt.
Well into spring quarter I was clearly headed toward the “die in the attempt” path. I’d ultimately been forced to forego laser cutting my image, but still clung desperately to my template and the vague hope that I would cut it out one day in the future. To make matters worse, the paper I was working on had long since become grimy and wrinkled (thinking of it as a mere template, I’d definitely abused the drawing more than I should have) and at one point I had even bled on it a little, which in retrospect seems quite an apt metaphor for the suffering of an artist.
Still, I couldn’t stand the thought of hanging up that grubby drawing as the culmination of three quarters of work. In a frantic last-ditch effort I wasted six hours the night before installation trying to trace my entire image by hand onto a fresh sheet of paper before realizing at 5 am that it was futile. The original piece went up.
All throughout installation I silently cursed my hubris and poor decision-making. I had done paper cuts before; I should have known I wouldn’t be able to accomplish such an elaborate idea, should have edited myself in the early stages. Then at least I wouldn’t have had to present something so pathetically far from what I proposed. At the time, I was miserable in the certainty everything had just been a huge waste of effort.
But now, in a strange way, I’m thankful for all of that—struggle, angst and all. I’m glad I was able to envision something grander than I could achieve, and believe—if only for a quarter or two—that I could actually make it happen. I even wish that I had been more like that as a freshman—and as a sophomore, junior, and senior; I wish that I had taken more risks on endeavors and experiences with uncertain payoffs instead of sticking strictly to things safely within the realm of possibility. In a strange way, I’m thankful to Sue and Andrew for looking at that ridiculous set of weekly milestones I submitted at the beginning and telling me to run with it. It was such a stark contrast to the way I started off college, when my pre-major advisor emphatically told me that I wouldn’t be able to handle my projected 20 unit-courseload freshman fall and suggested I drop a few classes. I find it ironic that I contradicted both sets of expectations: 20 units were very manageable, but apparently my TSR project milestones were not. Even so, that makes me all the more grateful to Sue and Andrew for assuring me that it was okay when I realized nothing would come together quite the way I had imagined it would in the beginning. Such is life. There are times when ambition pays off, and times when it doesn’t. In the latter cases, it’s simply a matter of learning to roll with the punches, and a healthy dose of reassurance never hurts.
As it turns out, “milestones” were a major theme both in The Senior Reflection and my Stanford career. I had always lived as if there was a set time to reach specific goals. Just as assignments are due at specific times (extension? What does that even mean?), at every stage of life, there was some point I had to be at and certain things I had to have accomplished. It was a formula that had worked well up until the end of high school: Honors, APs, SATs, internships… check, check, check, check. But that all began to break down in college. As quarters merged into years, I found that time and time again I had failed to achieve any of things I expected to have done by the end of each of those periods: my passionate life-calling did not descend from the sky at the end of freshman year (nor any other year for that matter); I didn’t publish any papers nor did I complete a thesis; for heaven’s sake I couldn’t even manage to get a foot into a lab on campus. With every “milestone” that I failed to meet I felt like more and more of a disappointment to my family and to myself, and even started to resign myself to the fact that I would never accomplish any of those things because the time frame for when I should have completed them had already come and gone.
I feel as if the despair and frustration of being convinced I was letting all the important landmarks of a successful life pass me by is aptly summarized by one particular academic deadline I happened to miss in senior spring. My third major assignment in Drawing II was to fill a large paper with “forms from nature” in a style reminiscent of old naturalist illustrations. By all accounts it should have been an easy task (drawing animals is my forte, after all), but I foolishly decided to draw skeletons—in particular a giant rock python appearing to consist entirely of thousands of ribs and vertebrae. Despite investing over 20 hours of meticulous drawing and colored-pencil shading on each individual bone fragment of that snake over the course of the week, I eventually realized there was no way I could possibly get it done by the due date. What’s worse, it looked so unfinished, mockingly refusing evidence the hours of toil I had poured into its making. In a moment of panic, I threw out my careful colored pencils and tried to block in wide swathes of color with pastel, detail be damned. While I did manage to color in a bigger area than before, I also ruined the entire drawing.
When I turned it in, my professor told me I could have it re-graded if I worked on it more before I turned in my final portfolio, but I haven’t touched it since. Like so many other aspects of my life, in my mind, the deadline had passed, the picture was ruined, and there was nothing I could do about it anymore. Up until that time, I had desperately clung to the belief that if I just tried hard enough and worked nonstop at the expense of food and sleep, I could make things work. In every previous instance, I had always managed somehow; not well, perhaps, but scraping by regardless. Failing to finish that piece despite my best efforts was a blow to my convictions and to my confidence that I could pull through with my assignments—and with my life—in time to hit my milestones.
At that point, I couldn’t help but worry that the ruined drawing was an ill portent for my TSR project (and to be fair, I did spectacularly fail to complete that artwork as well) but as it turned out there were a few key differences between the two that I think speak to my growth in these final stretches of college life.
• I may not have finished my TSR project the way I envisioned it, but I stayed true to my original trajectory and vision rather than sacrificing quality for an illusion of completion.
• I could see the project existing beyond to confines of strict deadlines, as a work of personal significance rather than a failed assignment that I never look back at
• I kept my mind open to the possibility of future progress on the piece and ended up with a drawing that, while not complete, is at a lovingly intermediate stage— “a prelude to a paper-cut,” as Sue artfully put it—that I would not be ashamed to continue expanding and developing
• I learned to forgive myself for trying to do more than I might safely be able to manage
Milestones are important. They help ground me in life and act as signposts for where I am and where I want to be. Milestones are important. But they aren’t everything. How far along should I be in life now? As far as I feel I need to be. Everyone leads a different life and succeeds at their own pace, in their own time—and hopefully, so will I. I worried throughout college that I had missed my milestones, that I’d fallen behind, that it was too late for me to do or to try certain things, and that all of these shortcomings were glaring indications that I did not belong at Stanford. But while in The Senior Reflection, I’ve learned otherwise. After just one quarter in the class, talking and thinking about what truly mattered to me and where I wanted to go in life, I took my first major risk. I’d spent my entire academic career locked into cell biology because it was safe and familiar, but for graduate school I applied to neuroscience programs, despite having taken only a few classes on the subject and lacking any pertinent lab experience. The subject was one that keenly interested me—something I could see myself doing even decades into the future—and for once, that was enough. Junior-year me would have called it insane (why would a graduate school accept me when I hadn’t managed to distinguish myself in any area, let alone neuroscience, as an undergraduate?)—but she would have been wrong. Despite all of my shortcomings and “missed” milestones, Columbia (like Stanford four years ago) apparently saw something in me, and this time I have the confidence to believe that it is not a mistake. Sure, my life path has deviated substantially from the “find your calling early on as an undergrad, work for four years in a relevant lab, write an honors thesis, and go to graduate school in that field” script I’d written in my head, but in the end I got to where I needed to go, skipped over a few milestones and hit unexpected new ones in the process.
I said in the beginning that I wanted closure—and I do. But that’s not quite what this is. Instead, this reflection is a bridge of sorts to new beginnings. In high school, getting to college was my main goal; as an undergrad, I struggled to become someone worthy of attending Stanford and then strove to be accepted into graduate school. I’ve worked hard towards each of these things, and have grown to appreciate the value and significance of that effort in helping me reach, or at least reach for, my milestones over the years. But none of these are actually endings, just intermediate stages—like my “Kelp forests,” a lovely prelude toward a more complete life.