As a marine biology student, Liz Neeley loves the order of science, but when a research expedition takes an unexpected turn, she must deal with the messy reality.
You can find the original version of Liz’s story here.
Liz Neeley was the executive director of Story Collider and cohost of our podcast. She started her career studying the color patterns of tropical fish. (It was in fact even better than her childhood dream of working in a crayon factory.) She surprised herself more than anyone when she left the research path and went into ocean conservation and policy. For the past decade, she has been helping scientists around the world tell more compelling stories about their work. Most recently, she helped commission and edit the 2018 series "Stories from the Front Lines" at PLOS Biology. She is a lecturer at Yale in conjunction with the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative. Follow her on Twitter @LizNeeley.
This story originally aired on September 24, 2019 in an episode titled “Before and After: Stories that evolve over time”.
Story Transcript
I love tests. I love them. Exams are my favorite thing. Which is a good thing because, as an American university student, I’m taking five or six classes per semester and each of those has somewhere between three and five exams so it’s almost on a weekly basis that I get to sit down and engage in a fencing match with my instructors.
I like to actually cover the answers to multiple choice questions so that you can read the question I know the answer. And then I imagine how I would write this test if I was trying to manipulate my students and then uncover them. It’s this game of like, “Oh, come on, Dr. Infantino. This is child’s play.” Or like, “Well done, Higgins. You almost got me, but not today. Not today.”
The thing was I didn’t just want to have the flawless multiple choice answers. I took great pride in drawing diagrams and illustrations that just tugged at the heartstrings. They were so beautiful and perfect. And this is a good thing because I would tear through these exams really rapidly and I wanted to impress my instructors, but my classmates not so much. I didn’t want them to know how much fun I was having with these exams, because I saw them as my competition at best.
Also, I was already not very popular. In case you can’t tell, I was a peach. But as I progressed through biology classes in undergraduate, things started to get more difficult. Instead of having my lovely little multiple choice exams, it would be something like a pile of sticks and twigs and weeds dumped in front of you and then your job was to identify those to species. The hard thing was that, in real life, those leaves and weeds rarely look exactly like the diagram you have so faithfully memorized so I sort of gritted my teeth.
And as I was working in a research lab on oysters as well, this same problem was plaguing me. In theory, my job was to catalog every bryozoan and polychaete worm and mussel, everything that grew on oyster reefs. In reality, what would happen is I would get these big chunks of oysters dredged off the bottom and then I would sit for hours over a tray, over stinking, noxious mud trying to pick apart and identify this gray, dead thing from that gray, dead thing. And my desire for order and beauty and perfection was really bumping up against science.
But for me, the big hurdle when you want to become a marine biologist, it’s not just the stuff that’s happening in the lab, the lab work and the exams that lead to the lab work, but the big test is the field work. So as our field work came up for my classes, I was getting more and more excited.
So there was one weekend where we all piled into a van with all of our waders and our gear and we took off across the Chesapeake Bay to the eastern shore of Maryland for a research cruise. As we pull up in front of this old, rambling, two-story, broken down house feeling great, we unpack all of our gear and then bottles start coming out. And this is okay because I’m ready for this as well.
Now, in the United States, for those of us who are rule followers, you're not allowed to drink until you're 21 but I knew that alcohol was an important part of marine biology and so I had to approach this like I approached everything else, with my lab notebook. I had meticulous student notes, like Kahlua, yes. Tequila, no. Blue Curacao, why blue? So I had cataloged my alcohol intake and I knew I was ready for this side of things as well.
I was not ready to watch this professor, who I hadn’t worked with before, finish off first one bottle of tequila and then the second and then start sloshing the third. As I watched his face get redder and redder and start to turn that hideous shade of purple that you know is bad news, he's getting louder and I’m getting quieter because if I know anything is that drunk men like that are dangerous and I don’t want to attract his attention.
So I stop drinking and he's starting to gesture and walk around the room and talk to people and then his bleary gaze locks on me. And he starts telling this incoherent ghost story about this old ghost who haunts the house. This old ghost loves curvaceous women and he really loves breasts, this old ghost. And this old ghost just happens to haunt the bedroom where I’m supposed to be staying and, don’t you know, this old ghost loves brunettes.
Now, I don't know for sure if he's talking about himself but I know he's talking about me and I’m done. I just stand up and leave and think I will take this situation into my own hands. So I go grab the mattress off the bed in the room I’m supposed to be staying in, drag it downstairs into the living room, sort of front and center, and I go to bed thinking problem solved. I’m back in control again.
So I fall asleep feeling quite confident and looking forward to the day tomorrow. Until I’m woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of somebody stumbling into the doorway. One minute I’m squinting with one eye at this silhouette as he's jangling coins and keys, and in the next moment I’m already starting to move because I hear his pants hit the floor.
I commando roll off my mattress and I grab the girl next to me and I just say, “Go, go, go, go, go,” and we run out a side door. But not before we can hear the unmistakable sound of him urinating. He's peeing all over himself, the floor, our stuff and our bed.
Now, for me, I’m disgusted and also angry but I’m trying to play it cool because these classmates who I’m in competition with, I’m also trying to impress. I know that being a scientist means handling whatever situation might come your way. I think I would have talked myself to just going back to bed if he hadn’t been snoring face down on my mattress. And so I think I'll look for the other instructor, the co-instructor who’s a graduate student. I'll find him and he’ll help me sort all of this out and figure out what we’re going to do, and I accidentally walk in on him having sex with one of the other students in my class.
It’s 3:00 in the morning on the eastern shore of Maryland and I go outside. I feel so alone and angry and embarrassed and uncertain. For lack of any better alternative, I make my way to the kitchen, I think as we all do in times of hardship, and I’m happy to see there there are four or five other students who were awake and sober who had witnessed bits and pieces of this night gone so terribly wrong. We sort of formed a little band and come up with a plan, which is an excellent one because it involves pancakes.
And searching for the syrup and mixing and baking it’s a welcome distraction. At this point it’s maybe 4:00 in the morning so we think, ah, we’ll go outside. We will take a night hike. We’ll look at the stars and name the constellations and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do. And what we decide is that we are indeed going to get on that boat, this is the research cruise that we’d come all this way for, regardless of what our professor may or may not be able to do.
So we make our way back and when even a cowbell rung immediately over his head fails to rouse him at all, we roll him onto his side into the recovery position hoping that he won’t aspirate and choke and die on his own vomit. I’m standing there looking down at him and I’m thinking what is this gray, stinking thing in front of me that I’m supposed to identify? Is this a scientist? Is this what this is all about? I don't know.
So while he's the one covered in vomit, I’m certainly feeling nauseated in a nice change of situation. Getting on the boat actually helped that situation quite a lot.
So we spent all day on the Chesapeake Bay and I’m looking at seagulls and sea grass and I’m starting to realize I do know these animals, these species. I know where to look for them, how to identify them, what they do, what they're like. I recognize them. They're like friends. There's the little blenny that’s got this Mohawk. It’s always angry. Chasmodes bosquianus. There's the Mytilus edulis, the mussel. There's the blue crab whose name Callinectes sapidus means beautiful swimmer. And these species become like a litany to me. The genus and species are soothing.
And at the end of the day, as we’re starting to motor back making our way over the waves home, I’m reflecting. I’m thinking about all that’s happened to me on very little sleep. I realize biology may not be about being perfect and being really good at exams. In any case, if this was a test, I wasn’t the one who failed it.
I think maybe biology is about realizing that the way you do it is you shake off a bad night, you grab your colleagues and collaborators and you go get on the damn boat and make sense of whatever happens to fall in front of you. Thank you.