I got my start in science as an undergraduate at the University of the Philippines, where I sampled different flavors of biology, from coral genomics to prostate cancer. A year after telling myself that I will never go into neuroscience (too esoteric) or work with worms (too boring), I am now a PhD student with Oliver Hobert studying the development of the C. elegans nervous system. Like they say: don’t knock it ‘til you try it. My interests are at the intersection of neuroscience, development, genetics, and evolution. In particular, I am curious about how the nervous system is organized, how it arose over evolutionary time, and how it can be reorganized over a lifetime.