all right I figured if you're going to
be absorbing information coming out of my mouth it would be nice to know who I
am and what my background is in Zoology you know a little hi my name is video so I'm
going to tell you how I got into zoology my background and experience and what my plans
are for this channel let's get right into it so I never expected to be a zoologist as a kid I
grew up in LA and was super into music and played guitar in a rock band in high school evidence
evidence I was also super into Criminal Minds so my ideas for a future career were a musician or
FBI and I applied to colleges with the intention of becoming a criminology major at the same time
junior year I was really into lions I would watch YouTube videos of them to fall asleep and I ended
up coming across a video of a big cat sanctuary in South Africa immediately looked into it and
saw that I could apply to volunteer there my high school required an internship at the end of
our senior year so I decided to try and make it work for that asked my counselor if I could go he
said yes asked my parents if I could go they said if you can pay for it so I got a job that summer
and saved up once the time came my parents were like oh shit you're actually doing it and my dad
ended up coming with me because he didn't want me traveling alone here's a video of him trying to
lead one of the lions into a separate part of the enclosure for feeding time my dad's a badass so
yeah the trip was life-changing to say the least it Sparked a whole new passion to me that I didn't
know I could have I was already on track to go to American University for criminology and I did
do my freshman year there but then I ended up transferring to Oregon State University for
zoology and this is when I realized I knew nothing about the major that I signed up for
I didn't know that I was gonna have to take molecular biology organic chemistry two fucking
calculus classes genetics when I found out dude the room was spinning I could have known that I
should have but I'm an impulsive bitch sometimes and don't look into things too deep I was also
a blank slate for animal knowledge to be honest I knew a lot about big cats but really nothing
else and I kind of spent my first year there only absorbing the information that applied to big
cats in my classes but of course that ended up changing the following year I got the opportunity
to intern at the cheetah conservation Fund in Namibia through OSU this was a turning point I was
most excited to work with the Cheetahs of course and luckily because I had that previous
experience with big cats in South Africa I was able to become the lead carnivore
intern and help with workups and releases here's a video of a brown hyena named Brownie
that I got to help release back into the wild and while I was there I ended up becoming more
ecosystem focused rather than big cat focused I had one supervisor Eli who would explain
why termite Mounds were so important for the ecosystem while we were out feeding the cats
and I would see animals that I had never heard of before for the first time right in front
of me on a daily basis kudu and jackals and oryx and so many insects dude but I realized that
the world was full of these little surprises that I never appreciated before and once I got back
from Namibia and started getting into more of the upper division classes invertebrate biology
and evolutionary biology it's like the pieces started coming together I wanted to know where
everything came from and how it came to be so I took all the evolution classes that I could every
single one OSU offered you can bet your ass I was in it and my invertebrate biology class dude that
was the biggest trip of my entire life like what the fuck do you mean sea slugs can steal jellyfish
stingers and use them as defense what do you means tardigrades can do what the fuck tardigrades
do it was just crazy dude okay I need to do a quick sidebar and I'm doing it here because
I don't know where else to do it one question I get asked a lot in my DMs is whether or not
going to school for biology is a good idea like based on my videos they want to go to school
to learn the stuff that my content covers and the reality is zoology courses are much more about
General mechanisms big picture stuff and learning how to research correctly there's a research
like properly digesting peer-reviewed papers for presentations and then there's research
like following the scientific method for lab experiments and whatnot you're not really going
into class learning this specific species of squid does this really obscure behavior on very rare
occasion and we've seen it five times unless it's being used as an example of a larger lesson and
a big chunk of my content does correlate with the information I learned in classes in college but
what I'm mostly applying are the tools to research a topic properly so just keep that in mind when
considering going to school for zoology it's very big picture rather than species specific okay so
when I graduated in 2020 I was so bummed that the opportunity to learn in that setting was over
and also of course I couldn't get a job because it was 2020. I'd been applying to sanctuaries
in southern Africa but of course that couldn't happen so I graduated and I didn't know what to
do and that is when I downloaded TikTok in July of 2020. My friend convinced me to try and make
educational content for the time being and that ended up being really cool I found the amazing
community of educational content creators and it just became what it is and a few months into
that I got accepted for an internship at the Wildcat Sanctuary in Minnesota and trying
to balance that with TikTok was impossible so TikTok took a back seat for a bit but I ended
up getting a pretty bad back injury there since it was so cold the work was really heavy on
maintenance and manual labor much more than I'd ever experienced before and I ended up having
to leave early and my back hasn't healed which is why I'm not working with big cats right now but I
got home and ended up getting a teaching job as a 9th grade biology teacher and that was very cool
it was really fun to try out different teaching methods and see what worked best and then try to
apply those to my content on TikTok and in July of this year I decided to quit that job and try out
content creation full time and start YouTube and here we are now I love teaching this way dude
the research that I can do for it and being able to explain things in more detail and not
oversimplify like I have to on TikTok because the algorithm really only likes videos that are
less than 30 seconds long I'm still adjusting to be honest going from 30 seconds to 10 minute
videos is a really big jump but I'm expecting to continue putting out longer and longer content
as time goes on and as I get more used to it and that brings me to the what to expect portion of
the video what kind of content I'll be putting on this platform of course there's the endless supply
of weird organisms and of course the prehistoric content and evolution explained in different ways
I'm eventually going to redo my history of life on Earth short series that I did on TikTok and
Instagram as a collection of long videos and maybe some more controversial topics that have many
points to consider I'm also planning to tackle some topics that I've been putting off for a while
now like Wildlife trafficking I've tried to do it before on TikTok but something that complicated is
pretty much impossible to convey correctly in a 60 second video and comments that belittle the cause
are pretty rough on me to be honest because I hold those conversations really close to my heart so
I'm still navigating how to best present them one of those ways is going to be by highlighting
conservation efforts for example I want to go back to cheetah conservation fund and use my
platform to highlight all of the things they do to help save the cheetahs and I want to do that
for other conservation groups as well eventually I would like to go back to school for a masters
too many topics to choose from I'm at a point where I can't pick one thing that I want to spend
that much money on to go to grad school for a big dream of mine is to open a big cat sanctuary here
in California so maybe something related to that but for now I'm really really happy making these
videos and connecting with you guys I'm so happy to finally be doing this and I hope you're excited
for what's to come so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss my next long form video coming next
week and you can keep up with my daily short form on TikTok and Instagram and for now stay curious
the world has a lot for us to learn see ya