If you are, at the moment, a senior in high school with huge, twinkling plans of pursuing a career in science—mainly in Physics and Astronomy—and obtain that “miraculous” internship at NASA or Tesla, then this is your warning.

Please don’t. Life is short.

I’ve been there, done that.

Or perhaps, if Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now has been your life-long motto and you are too eager to venture in the field of the mighty physical sciences, with hopes and phantasms of becoming the next Richard Feynman, or Marie Curie—if you are a female, like me—then please, my best tip for you is to grab that remote control on your bedside, turn on your flat-screen television, and watch NatGeo instead. Good. Lovely. Or if by any unfortunate circumstances, your father’s watching his goddamned football game and you are in no position of doing that, then just tap that Youtube icon on your phone and chew over your favorite science channel. I could recommend some like MinutePhysics or Khan Academy, but please, for the sake of your lovely soul, this is where you should stop with this silly writing of mine.

Why?

Well, simple: this would frankly shatter your hopes. Your childhood dreams. Your dreamy daydreams during noon breaks of college application season. Your rose-colored nights of star-gazing on the winter night sky, eyes fixed so firmly on the moon meditating about the Lunar Landing Mission back in 1969.

Guess why I know?

Well, again, been there done that. Used to be on that page too, darling.

Funny enough, by a snowball's chance in hell, I somehow managed to obtain that golden card: the “miraculous” internship at NASA; Batch 1995, along with ten other keen, whip-smart fellows. Wow fantasy fulfilled. But God, who would’ve even thought I’d be ing one of them? Either they must have had a magical, crystal ball or are the fleshly embodiment of God’s alter ego. Or maybe, the world somehow bent out for me. Considering the heaps of applicants, a mountain of chips somehow landed on my tray. No one just ing knew how.

Picture me, a young lass with soft, black hair, standing five feet and three inches. Picture, per se, a promising lass bare from all those Revlon concealers and scarlet blushes, dark bags had stained the crease of her lower lids as requited guerdons from countless all-nighters she pulled just to get to where she’s currently at—the friggin’ internship. Worth it? Maybe. Hopefully.

Well, of course, it was worth it. It felt worth it. If you measure its worth by the amount of congratulatory greetings you’d receive from your undergraduate professors and university fellows, then it surely is.

In that galactic cerebrum of yours, picture eleven bachelors and bachelorettes in their early twenties, all walking on the ground floor of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center—almost in perfect disposition—en route to the grand obtainment of their respective degrees in engineering or physics or aviations—that is if they don’t up this “miraculous” internship.

Straight-spine, chin up. My two-inch Louboutin heels clicked the sleek, graphite tiles of the ground, enunciating a satisfying sound that’s remarkably dulcet to my sense of hearing. The sound of triumph, indeed.

Along with two other promising female scholars, our stance exuded a good deal of aplomb and sapience. Not a single crease on the faces of the other two was made in response to the chaffing, fitted pencil skirt the three of us were wearing. Not even a partial shrimp. Well, being a female in the mid 1990s. Apart from the 3-8 gender ratio, female interns were imposed to come in tight pencil skirts and black heels no lower than two inches. Charming. but to hell with it; we were females at Kennedy Space Center of NASA, and that’s all that matters, right?

My façade preserved its stern expression with body movements as limited as possible as we continued walking down the grand hallway, masking the shivers that was tingling down my spine. Palms getting warm and damp from all the serotonin and dopamine and other neurotransmitters that were in governance within my brain. Cool.

Related search: Just fake it ‘til we make it.

“I heard that the 1970 Nobel Prize receiver’s only son works in this department,” The female beside me leaned ever so slightly and whispered. By impulse, my eyebrows raised in admiration before slightly veering towards her, leering on the name plate pinned in front of her left that read Seohyun.

“Really? the 1970 physics Nobel laureate? Wow.”

“Yeah, I just don’t know why he’s in the aviations department though.” Her gaze was steadily fixed ahead, feet discernibly too careful with every step they were taking as judged by their mere sounds. See? Being a woman really and the sole clicking sounds of her stilettos were wailing her own vexation, despite her clamped shut lips.

“Is he really good? Or just saved by his name that he landed a job here?”

“Sshh!” The man in front hissed, halting my unnecessary question card from its own evanescence. “You are not here to gossip around.” The HR agent added flatly, facing on the sides as if to judge us on his peripherals.

I lightly bit at my lower lip in response for my embarrassment; definitely not the most advisable thing to do on your first day of internship.

By dint of distracting myself—both from the agitation that was consuming my bits inside and from humiliation—I focused my gaze far away: on the walls that seemed graspable by my two fingers that put an end on the numerous gray tiles of the floor, and the tinted, massive spherical glass at the center of the ceiling. They said it was KSC’s trademark among all the other NASA Centers: receiving vitamin E for free by walking on the headquarter’s ground floor before the mark of dusk. The tinted, polished glass appeared lambent nonetheless as the bright, rosy rays of the dayspring peeped through its translucent surface, highlighting every face that was passing by, every figure of the people that was walking through.

These faces, these people, they were white-collar professionals. Some were female, most were men. But they were, by far, all grey-haired—if not on their way. Almost all of them had a white gown hung on their bodies with a clipboard enveloped in arms. Funny how it almost felt like interning in the Neurosurgery department at Johns Hopkin’s rather than a space agency.

I wondered if these people, these stressed-out, workaholic crackerjacks, were aware that the rosy rays from the ceiling of their own workplace were visibly accentuating their wrinkles. The bruise-like bags resting under their eyes. The permanent crease on their foreheads. I wondered if they had that fact stored as an explicit memory resting in the hippocampus of their heavy heads and if they liked it—or to be fair, if they think it was all worth it.

For these people, these white-collar dab hands, they were that university fellow who never opted to attend fraternity parties during their undergraduate studies, but rather study all night and all dawn long just to get an A+ in Electromagnetism—and yet, still failed in doing so (because no one ever gets an A+ in EM). These people, they’d rather listen to the Feynman Lectures audiobook for hours rather than that flaring gossip about their senior professor’s pregnancy. They were the same people, whose paramount fleshly correlation was an ultra-thinned pair of glasses obstructing their stressed-out façade, they highly presumed that the pinnacle of their success in this brief lifetime of ours could only be attained once they obtain that doctorate degree in their hands safe and secured.

Half of their sober life was dedicated to this and for this: to be on the higher seats with respect to the new discoveries of this sill