Expert Review.
Professional Rewrite.

The petri dish shattered at 2 AM, scattering agar across my bedroom floor. Most teenagers would have cursed and gone to bed. I grabbed my notebook, not a broom. Even a failed attempt to culture Vibrio fischeri was still a result—another clue in my three-year quest to understand how marine organisms create light without heat. I built a shoebox incubator with a seedling mat, learned sterile technique after contaminating a dozen plates, and wrote a Python script to track luminescence as I tweaked temperature and salinity. When the glow finally stabilized, it wasn't luck; it was the luciferase reaction behaving the way my notes predicted. That experiment didn't end with a perfect plate—it ended with a better hypothesis and an email to a local lab, where I spent weekends running controls on their spectrophotometer. Biology, to me, isn't a set of answers; it's the discipline of turning "why" into "how," one messy, midnight iteration at a time. That's the work I want to keep doing in college.