Biology affects your life in lots of ways. For instance, understanding how your organs and organ systems work together can help you maintain a healthy lifestyle. Learning how cells communicate with each other, how cellular processes are controlled and coordinated, and what regulates cell growth can help you understand many common diseases and identify the ways that drug therapies work. A solid appreciation for the inter-connectedness of life at the population, community, and ecosystem levels can help you learn more about the environment and how you alter it.

Ultimately, if you become knowledgeable about the science that underlies disease, environmental issues, and hot-button research initiatives, like stem cell research, you will be a more thoughtful and valuable contributor to debates that surround how this research is used and understood. Biology isn’t just for biologists: it’s useful—even fundamental—to everyone living on this lovely planet.

In addition to these practical benefits, you may find that once you know biology, you better appreciate just how beautiful, complex, and amazing the natural world is. In this sense, biology is not so different from art or poetry. A painter may appreciate a beautiful flower by painting it; a poet may garner the same appreciation by writing about it; and a biologist appreciates the flower by understanding how it works and how it came to be, even if that seems a little nerdy.

And, if these aren’t compelling enough reasons to study biology, consider the variety of smart, unique pickup lines that are inspired by biology:

"Nice genes."

"You are the light pulling my cotyledons through the soil of life."

"You increase my metabolism like oxygen to a facultative anaerobe."

Try those on your crush. Who says scientists can’t be romantics?

A final word

When the going gets tough, remember: compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, you have a huge brain to body size ratio. Don't let evolution down. Use that gray matter to its full potential. You got this.