[Anna writes...] “You don’t look like a tromp-around-in-the-woods type.”
​
It was 2012, and after four years in an Environmental Studies undergraduate program and a few summers spent in various eco-jobs, I was more than familiar with the expected look. Luckily, the boy commenting was a cute prospective graduate student from Washington D.C. at my grad school interview weekend and not, say, my future advisor who was about to hire me to “tromp around in the woods.”

[Anna writes...] It's me. Actually, it's the research. 

​I have known I would leave academia since Monday, February 25, 2013. It was my first year of grad school. A professor in my department’s wife had had a baby the day before, on Sunday. On Monday he came into work like it was a normal day.