"So, what kind of research do you want to do?"

This may not be word for word, but this is the question to which I felt I floundered the most during my phone interview for graduate school yesterday.  I joked later that I sputtered out something akin to, "I like fish."

It's funny though, I have been consumed for the last six months with the task of getting into a graduate program that I had become distanced from what my personal statement of curriculum vitae actually say and mean.  I wrote these words, but after so much modification for each program- they started to mean nothing to me.  So early this morning when I could not sleep, I started thinking about the question posed to be by my interviewer.

I do like fish, so I am sure whatever  I said was accurate.  Delve deeper.  I want the ocean to maintain its biodiversity.  Probably not gonna happen, but a noble task to labor for.  Think harder.  Pelagics.  Oh yeah, that is what I am really passionate about.  My blue whale, white elephant, unicorn what have you.

Pelagic fish are basically open water fish.  This makes them hard to govern with fishing laws and thus many species are terribly overharvested.  This is what I want to work on.  The problem with no solution.  How do you protect something which cannot be contained?  Something which may not be able to be bred in captivity. Something grand and wild!  And something that is sadly harvested like wheat- the world seems to think these fish are there for their consumption alone.  Something endangered that needs me.  That is the answer to the question.

I want to help the fish with no real hope for the future.  I have always been a sucker for seemingly lost causes or orphan types.  Hello bluefin tuna, sardine, snapper- let's be friends.