When I visited college campuses last year, there were two must-see destinations on each campus. It’s a library and a forest (for those unfortunate universities that didn’t have space for a forest due to the vagaries of geography, a garden would suffice). These two locations are also the easiest for me to find, classwork and assignments permitting. Interesting volumes, maze-like ledges, mossy valleys, stands of oak and pine, and I’m coming into my own.
Homeschooled since kindergarten, I was rarely more than a few feet away from a book. An important part of a public library’s collection was usually located in a corner of the living room. My parents’ books lined the walls, and my ever-growing library began filling the shelves in my bedroom until it was overflowing. All of these things encouraged me to grow. In books like bacterial colonies on agarose. I learned from books, reproduced in books, and began to appreciate learning itself.
Despite this obvious bibliophilia, it has been my love and awe of the natural world that has primarily driven my interests since I was at least five years old. That’s when I began my innocent quest for encyclopedic knowledge, from dinosaurs to living animals (to give my mom a much-needed break). Mrs. Protoceratops). My best friend and I read obsessively about cassowaries and tardigrades and began amassing a collection of exotic stuffed animals that would later form autonomous republics and conduct mass experiments in electoral systems. Now, I explore the outdoors as much as I can by foot, bike, kayak, and cross-country ski, craving the freedom of snow-covered forests and autumn-colored swamps.
Lately, I’ve started to see similarities between Nico the Bookworm and Nico the Frolic in the Forest. I would like to think that these connections were due to exposure to the field of research. Ever since I started working in a botany lab the summer before my 11th grade year, I have tried my best to see these vitally important forests with new eyes and understand the mechanisms that drive their functioning. inquiry. What is the classification of this impressive fern? How did the lizard plant evolve from the supports of Carboniferous swamp forests to a modest, fuzzy Christmas tree-like creature creeping along the boreal forest floor? Using the tools of modern science, we can read the contents of an ecosystem much like the contents of a library, with ecosystem eDNA forming the catalog and community ecology forming the collection structure. The biology of each organism holds a wealth of information.
On the contrary, books come alive with an investigative eye. Through classes that focused on historical research methods, I learned how texts need to be examined through their context. Each author, work, or moment is deeply interconnected with many other writers, works, or moments. The flow of ideas through social systems may not be that different from the flow of energy through natural systems. Above all, libraries and forests share a sense of timelessness. That moment is when we find ourselves lost in thought at the profound immensity of evolutionary time, or when we begin to wonder after long hours of browsing through labyrinthine archives and arcane pages, not just Borges. After all, the idea that the universe consists of an infinite library in space and time, the center of which is undefined and the periphery inaccessible, may not have been true.
I’m Nico Zepeda, a freshman from Madison, Wisconsin. I plan to major in Biology, but would like to explore many other fields in parallel, such as history, philosophy, environmental science, and architecture. I’m glad to be in an environment like Duke, where I see fascinating, interdisciplinary research at every corner. I am also even more excited to be able to interact directly with Duke’s talented researchers and share their findings through our research blog.
Nicholas Zepeda, Class of 2028
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