I can count more plushies lined along my childhood bed than fingers on my hands.

I have some stuffed animals like sharks and alligators from my trips to IKEA. The massive, soft dragon plushie from my 14th birthday. I have a big orca stuffie from Amazon and an assortment of Pokémon stuffed toys.

I have none of insects.

When choosing a college major or career, people are often encouraged to pick something that aligns with their hobbies and interests. If you have an interest in verbal debate, you'd probably be inclined towards political science or law. If you've always been doodling new characters and coming up with words in your mind, the world of character design and world-building would grab and drag you by the pen.

I thought a similar sort of logic would guide me – something logically reasonable, predictable, safe. A career that mirrored my childhood love for mammals that I could name and theoretically cuddle.

On practically every single ride home from elementary school, I'd beg and nag my mom endlessly for a puppy once we moved out, offering to compromise with even a kitten or a guinea pig.

I had to hide my face when my friend presented his pet tarantula's molt during show and tell in kindergarten.

So why entomology?

Why would I willingly choose to enter a field I've held no passion for in the past?

It started as a small trip and scrape on the knee. I had forgotten to submit a form that decided one of my electives for the semester, and the class I was dropped into only had three students, including myself. The technical topic was hard to follow, and it was hard for me to imagine spending hours out of my week in a class I knew I wouldn't put effort into.

Fortunately, I still had the time to ask for a reschedule. Shortly after leaving my second time in that classroom, I went to email my counselor to request a switch into a different program. But before I clicked send, I knew that if I didn't ask for anything further, I'd probably just be sent into another similar class where I lacked the interest to keep up.

Looking through the list of offered programs, nothing caught my eye. I had been looking for one about animals in particular, but there wasn't any general zoology or animal psychology class in the course selection at all. The closest thing to it was entomology: the study of insects. And the teacher happened to be my homeroom teacher, which made having this program first class in the morning a relief.

Despite my initial hesitance on whether or not I made the right decision as I entered a room with a total of three students the next week, I found myself warming up to the class quite a lot. Even though he had three tank enclosures solely for Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches, it didn't quite click for me that my teacher had a PhD and an astoundingly fiery passion for insects.

Over the course of the semester, our little group of four (five including our teacher) would take a very expansive approach to entomology. We had gone through insect classification and identification, alongside catching a ladybug and a fly in our own school field. We even got to dissect some of our teacher's cockroaches – those of which had died of natural causes.

I think there were two major breakthroughs as I went through moving this curtain of hesitance aside:

For one, the amount of sheer wonder I felt when I truly realized that my teacher had dedicated such a major portion of his life and work into a field I had never quite considered really blew me away. I mean, insects were of course also animals, but unless someone directly said word for word "what about studying insects specifically?", the thought wouldn't have crossed my mind. Watching videos he took while doing entomology-related work at places on different continents was kind of like enlightenment; he was not only recognizing these small creatures and their roles in the ecosystem he was walking through but he was excited – and it was quite noticeable too.

Second, I never realized how fun a presentation could be. We had to present an insect class or order of our choice, alongside different topics like physical attributes, life cycles, distinguishing traits, and some notable species. It felt so strange when I had the sensation as if I were presenting myself – it felt so natural to talk about this order of creatures I had only just gotten pretty familiar with.

Maybe it was because I had finished the slideshow the night before presentations, or maybe it was because I felt comfortable sharing something that other people wanted to learn about.

But I believe that period where I spent fifteen minutes talking about stick bugs with an enthusiasm I didn't know I had, was the start of something real.

I didn't need to grow up surrounded by plushies of insects or own one of my own. What mattered was that the spark happened at all – the unexpected shift from dispassion to curiosity, and eventually genuine interest. I learned that deep-rooted passion doesn't have to start from the very beginning. Sometimes, it sneaks up on you in a classroom with three classmates, a few tanks full of cockroaches, and a teacher who really, really, loves insects.

So why entomology?

Because I gave it a chance.