Sebastian Sonesten
Ever since I was a tiny little child I have loved dinosaurs. Throughout my nineteen years, I have discovered that many other things are beautiful as well: family and friends, music, books, tv-shows, ice cream, and, most importantly, life. This site is about the latter: my life of exploring extinct life – my life as a prospective paleontologist. (“Prospective” in both senses of the word; I cannot help making far-fetched jokes sometimes.)
I was born in Santa Clara, Cuba, in August 1992. My mother is Cuban, my father Swedish. Shortly before my first birthday, we moved to Uppsala in Sweden, and have lived there since. Both my parents are limnologists (working with freshwater), and I spent much of my first years around their workplace, terrorizing their colleagues by grabbing anyone within sight and giving them hour-long lectures about dinosaur life and habits, vividly illustrated with my plastic toys.
My brother, four years younger, did not share my urge for dinosaurs at all, and I begin to suspect all those genes went into me instead of him.
My library was dominated by dinosaur children books, and I had tons of dinosaur videos. I knew Walking with Dinosaurs by heart, but that was no reason to stop watching it. However, my fanaticism went dormant for a couple of years during the later years of primary education. My friends were mostly moped guys and horse girls, so there was no one to talk to about dinosaurs. (I of course refused to talk about mopeds and horses, so I had to think of other things.) Luckily, some were into computer games.
But that ended with the beginning of high school. I studied the International Baccalaureate, or IB – apparently the toughest programme in Uppsala. In short, most interests had to make way for lots and lots of studying.
It was tough, apparently the toughest programme in Uppsala, but it was great in many more ways! The IB years were the best and most important in my life, so far, so I thought I should go into a little more detail here.
The IB is two years long, taught entirely in English (except for the language courses, of course). Each student chooses six different subjects and at what level to study them. At standard level, I took mathematics, chemistry and English (as second language); at higher level: biology, history and Swedish (as first language). So, these were the subjects I specialised in during two years. I had no idea what I wanted to work with later, so I chose what I was interested in and what I thought would be useful later.
Sometime during the first year, I read a short book on the history of life on Earth, and was completely entranced by its beauty. Not only did it re-evoke my passion for dinosaurs, but it also showed what other incredibly marvellous creatures had lived before, during and after the dinosaurs, and when I realised the place of the larger animals groups in the chain of evolution, the world around me changed entirely – to the better! I knew precisely what I wanted to do later in life: study paleontology.
My first opportunity to do this came with the largest assignment in the IB: the Extended Essay, or EE – a major research essay to be carried out in any one of your chosen subjects. There was no doubt: I would write it in paleontology, as a subgroup within biology. I decided to write about the then-current debate about whether Tyrannosaurus rex was a predator or just a scavenger.
The adventure of writing the EE was an important part of my life, as it convinced me beyond any kind of doubt that I wanted to do paleontology research in the future.
The EE process was quite like the process of a university thesis: there was competition for supervisors, it was our own responsibility to organise it all – to find material, to ask the supervisors for help or feedback – we had peer review between students within the same subject, and so on. This was rather challenging, especially the feedback part, since I had such an unusual subject, and not even my supervisor cared much. The only one who actually was interested was out EE coordinator. He did not know much about biology, which was great because he then saw my arguments from a completely different point of view, and I had to make huge efforts to make the reasoning clear and convincing. He helped me reshape my essay into something quite different: a model for the energy efficiency of T. rex if it would have been a scavenger, used to argue about whether T. rex would have been a more efficient scavenger if it had been warm- or cold-blooded. (Note that I did not at any time believe that T. rex was a pure scavenger – I only wished to toy around with the idea, and it made the model far easier.)
Seeing the evolution of my creation, overcoming the challenges, weighing the arguments, hating the word limit, and the pride over the final product, was so unbelievably fun that the years I must wait for an opportunity to do something similar again sometimes feel like torture. For the first time, I had a clear goal in my life.
However, this is not the only way I changed during the IB. Before, I had been quite ok with being alone, and going straight home after school. But, here, I found the best of best friends, and learned the value of socialising, meeting up after school and spending late nights together with these wonderful people.
I still do not enjoy large, noisy parties with hundreds of people crammed in a room. I never have, and probably never will. I prefer to have a quiet evening with two or three of my closest friends, talk about pretty much anything, make bad jokes, share dreams and ideals, and make their lives a part of mine.
So, the IB made my life clearer, and my friends made it richer.
Now that my goal was to become a paleontologist, I knew what I had to do: go to university. Unfortunately, there is no paleontology programme in Sweden, so I had to look elsewhere. Since I had studied my entire high school in English, I turned my thoughts toward Britain, where I found the Paleontology and Evolution MSci programme at the University of Bristol, which has an almost unmatched reputation within paleontology and a really interesting curriculum.
However, I was not ready to move abroad yet; I needed more life experience before I could sustain myself in a new country. Luckily, it was possible to apply for a coming year, so-called deferred entry. I applied for entry in autumn 2012, but failed. It was a hard blow, but I knew that I had to use this gap year to boost my application. I took several university courses, most about geology, and worked at a scientific department to acquire some experience about how things work in them. I also made contact with some professional paleontologists at the museum in Uppsala.
However, most of my friends actually got in at universities in England, and I did not feel that it was good to make new friends in Sweden if I would be accepted into Bristol University next year, and have to leave them behind. So this year was pretty empty. Luckily, I had my family and Tim, who helped me live through each dreary day, and knowing that my other friends would come back during their breaks.
I applied for the University of Bristol again (but not deferred entry, so for 2012), and was successful this time! Boo yah!! Fantastic news! I was filled with happiness like a balloon for at least a week. Now life could start for real!
It will be hard to leave my family and Tim, but I will of course return during the breaks. And there is always Facebook and Skype! Hihi!
This Mars, mom and I were invited to an open house day at the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol. Not that I had any doubts that it was the right choice, but it was better than I had even imagined! Beautiful, oldish buildings, impressive research things, and lovely, weird people. I love weird people – I feel most comfortable with them, surely because I am weird myself, and gladly admit it.
What I liked most about the visit, however, is how closely the students bond with each other and with the teachers – just as in the IB – through group work, fieldtrips and societies. There is also a lot of interaction between students of different years. All become a like family (literally, actually).
The posts in this blog start with my first paleontological fieldtrip, a week around Estonia, part of a geology course I took this winter.
