Evelyn Astafiev Holmes

I feel like a sliver of my own work or perseverance, but so much of it is very much determined by where I'm from and the interests that I have, which I owe to my parents and where I live and by whom I was raised. So much of my life is just determined by where I live, by whom I was raised, and all of that. It's really easy to sometimes get down into the 'oh, I did so much to get here,' but really a lot of it is just where I'm from and who raised me. I feel like my parents are the biggest factor in any success I've achieved.

It's a combination of advice from different people, but the most impactful has been from my dad, who's a musician. He tells me to make sure that music remains something that I love, and not something that I go into as a career, since it's really hard to continue loving art when it's also your moneymaker. He warns me not to let my passion or the things that I love turn into a source of income, because then it can kind of turn something that you love into something that becomes like a chore. Combined with other people telling me to do something that is meaningful to me, I think the culmination of all of that would be trying to find a balance between something that is fulfilling and something that I can enjoy doing, but not necessarily something that would take the joy out of something I love.

When I was a senior in high school, one of the biggest things I remember feeling was that I needed to end up going to the best place and have the best this and the best that, and I needed to be really great. The need to be the best totally overshadows your personal experience. Wherever you end up going and whatever you end up doing, as long as you feel like your heart's in it and you're enjoying it to some degree and you meet the right people, then you're where you're supposed to be. I feel very strongly that I am where I'm supposed to be, geographically and mentally. It's really easy to put so much pressure on where you're going to go to college and what you're going to do, but as long as you focus on studying things that are interesting to you and surrounding yourself with people who have similar interests, then it's really easy to be in the right place wherever you go. You don't have to put so much pressure on where that'll be.

Now that I'm in the more ending stages of college, I'm thinking back a lot on the interests that I've gotten to explore while here, and the interests that I also maybe didn't spend as much time nurturing or looking at. My current challenge is trying to figure out what I can do. I think that maybe one of my driving things in life has been what I can do to be successful, or what I should do and what I ought to do. Right now, my focus is on reframing that so that I'm doing things because I want to and because they're fulfilling to me, and not just because I should. I'm reworking that a little bit so that I can see it from the latter way, rather than doing it because I should.

Probably a combination of kindness, humility, and curiosity. Kindness is self-explanatory. Humility is something I've noticed in some of the most interesting or inspiring mentors I've had - people who are absolutely brilliant and at the top of their field. The most inspiring thing about the way they teach or pass on their lessons is when they're humble, and when it's all about just sharing knowledge rather than imposing it on someone, and when it's about making it about the subject and not about their mastery of the subject. I'm so much more impressed by them and by how much they know when they make it about what they know, and not the fact that they know it. Curiosity is important to be curious, whether that's in an artistic way, like curiosity about how I want to communicate a musical idea when I'm practicing, or in a lab setting, curiosity about why I might see a certain effect based on what we're doing and the conditions we're subjecting the cells to. I also value humor - it's good to be able to laugh at yourself. I laugh at myself a lot. Taking yourself seriously all the time is really hard. Life is a little easier when you can laugh at yourself.