Getting my PhD: a nearly 12-year journey.

Where things got started.

I was what we like to call a non-traditional student. I wasn’t much of (rather, I wasn’t) a studious student, especially in high school. I got decent enough grades to keep the parents happy but was otherwise focused on skateboarding, playing guitar, going to shows and parties, etc. In fact, I only ended up going to college because I’d get to share an apartment with my older brother in the hip city of Buffalo, NY, where he had already established a hip friend group. That was in 2011.

I mostly floundered in my first year at the University at Buffalo. I was undeclared and toyed with the usual liberal arts courses. At one point, I was obsessed with the American Civil War and occasionally considered becoming a historian after taking a course on it. But, I was at least wise enough to know that would considerably narrow my post-undergraduate prospects. At another point, I thought I’d be a digital photographer to only realize, well, I wasn’t terribly creative, and I frankly did not comprehend digital art. What was for damn sure: I had absolutely zero interest in STEM. This was confirmed after nearly failing my only life science course I took at UB - evolution. “Hardy Wein-who?” “Allele frequencies?… the hell does that mean?”

I have a very vivid and bizzare memory of when my interests started to change. It was the summer after my first year at UB. I was at my mother’s house, probably hungover as hell, and I remember I had just finished watching David Lynch’s Eraserhead. After watching it, I was completely in a funk and put on some random background tele to help snap out of it. The brand I cannot remember, but an organic dog kibble commercial came on. I remember there was a golden retriever prancing through a corn field in slow motion - I think the sun was setting - and a soothing voice described their “all natural” and organic ingredients. I don’t know why, but something struck me about that commericial. “Organic?… the hell does that mean?”

Apparently I was lost enough in my studies that a dog kibble commercial was enough to inspire me to enroll in an environmental writing course that fall. This is when I started to feel an earnest interest in my studies. In the spring, I enrolled in an environmental studies course that was effectively a book club reading the likes of Bill McKibben and watching plenty of TED talks. Our final project for this course was to design and present on an evironmental agency for any environmental cause of our choosing. Once again, I have a strangely vivid memory of being in a Panera Bread surfing TED talks. It was then that I learned of the Mushroom Death Suite. I had always had an obsession with death. With my newfound passion for protecting the environment, I discovered that fungi were beautifully placed at the interface of life death.