The Last of my Undergraduate Summers :)

Good morning everyone!

I’ve been cruising the Class of 2018 Facebook page to see if there’s any questions it’d be helpful for me to answer… but it looks like the current Wellesley students have got it well in hand. So many questions, and so many quick and informative responses! (*pats us on back*). 

Let’s see then, what might it be informative to tell you about… the odd thing is, we just have so much knowledge in us that we accumulate over the years that we don’t access except by direct questioning. Like the fact that I have a ridiculous amount of plot lines and characters stored in my head that provide no beneficial use to anyone. Or that I can explain how to sign up for classes through Banner, or what is essential for packing up your stuff in the dorm, or how to get to a lot of locations in downtown Boston, or how to make polar plots in Matlab (just learned that one yesterday), or how to make images transparent in GIMP (another acquirement from yesterday)…

Or even, if asked, answer a lot of questions about color and how our research lab works. Which astounds me every time, because it’s not like I took a class on psychophysics methods or color calibration. It’s just kind of accumulated knowledge, gathered based on questions I asked through the last two years, or looked up on Google on a need-to-know basis. I didn’t really sit down at any one point and study this information. And yet, I know more about our research than the younger undergraduates in our lab. The concept is so foreign to me, that I am going to be accumulating my knowledge in the future not through classwork but through this sort of osmosis and slowly-figuring-it-out, when-I-need-this. I spent an hour and a half making a plot in Matlab yesterday that, after that hour and a half, I realized was totally unnecessary, so I deleted that code. But now whenever someone asks me to make a polar plot I know I’ll be faster, since I spent the time in that moment to wrestle through it. It’s such a weird type of learning—not hours set aside to learn everything that’s on a syllabus, which you might use in the future and might not—but just taking the time to figure things out as they come along.

And also, I’ve realized this summer just how many opportunities I have at Wellesley. I end up saying something to this end almost every time I post, I think, and I find it humorous that I’m surprised every time. Like, I definitely did some whining about the fact that I had to do a scientific poster session for Wellesley and also one for MIT… but then I talked to some of the members of my program who had never done a scientific poster session before. I’m sure you’ve never done a scientific poster session before either (you present the research data you’ve accumulated on a 3- by 4-foot poster that you hang in a big room with a whole bunch of other posters, then you stand in front of the poster and talk about what you did when people come up to ask about it.) but I forget about that too—because I’ve done probably around six by this point, and I kind of assume everyone learns along with me. On the other hand, I definitely get the impression that I’m an idiot in research lab when I ask a question that’s obvious to people who have been there longer than I have, so it’s not just a personal problem. Maybe that’s what makes a good teacher, the ability to meet people at a level where you’re not assuming they know nothing, but you’re not expecting them to know what you know either. I imagine experience would also aid in this case—experience in knowing what others know and how fast they can learn.

As you might have guessed, my mind is on research this week: it’s been an eventful time! On Tuesday the lab had a good-bye party for Galina and Jane, two long-term members of our lab who are going to medical school. Galina is a “lifetime commitment member,” which we have designated as anyone who has spent over a third of her life in the Conway lab.   Needless to say, there was a lot of crying. On Wednesday I went out to dinner with members of the Born lab (who work down the hall), who were saying goodbye to their lab technician, Catherine, who is going to vet school. And then on Thursday all of the undergraduates in the Conway lab (save me—I leave this Thursday) finished up their program and went home, so the lab’s pretty empty by this point. I’ve been working to finish my MIT program requirements (poster, 5-page research summary, program review, evaluation), and then I’ll head out as well… the end of this summer is quite a transition for the three full-time members of the Conway lab.

But I do want to talk about something fun this week, which was the Wellesley poster session on Thursday :). This is my third year at the Wellesley poster session; it takes place in the Science Center, and as of last year they started providing food, which means lots of people come :P. The whole thing lasts two hours, and you’re expected to stand in front of your poster for an hour and present, and then for the other hour you can go check out other peoples’ posters. The posters are grouped by department, so it’s quite easy to go find friends and hear about any updates to their research… since you’ve already gone to their Rulhman presentations and summer presentations and know the gist of what they’re doing already. I’m always approached by a couple of strangers or previous professors as well, and I was again surprised by how much I’d learned through osmosis, and was able to spit out coherently about retinal cones and computational modeling, even though this information was not on my poster. Galen and Eileen were presenting besides me (Evelyn left for Korea on Tuesday), and it seemed like everyone had a good time. I really enjoy engaging interested people one-on-one about my work—in lab, I’m never the “expert,” but for this one poster session, no one knows more than I do about what I’ve been doing this summer, and so it’s all on me to tell the story of my hypothesis and results and my conclusion, and leave them with a greater understanding of one small piece of knowledge.

Speaking of scientifically-interested people, I’m going to be incredibly sad to leave all of my MIT program people come Thursday. Though our ages range from 17 to 31 and we come from diverse backgrounds and schools, this group has been utterly fantastic—everyone gets along so well, sharing a common perspective on science and commitment and curiosity. It’s the curiosity I can’t get over—people here are just so fascinated by how things work, asking questions and poking around trying to answer them—and not just scientific, but with people too. Discourses I’ve been treated to this summer (in the evening in the 2^nd floor kitchen): how you computationally model creativity, living in Delhi, why looking for incoming white matter tracts to visual area 1 is important, the different ways to cook plantains, what organisms life in estuaries, what is an estuary, why probabilistic systems analysis is a class worth taking, what’s Magic and its degree of nerdiness, why Family Guy is funny, how thick the skull is and how it affects near-infrared spectroscopy, the reputations of three universities in Puerto Rico… when you’re in a group that works this well together, is so eager to learn about differences and just be open-mindedly interested and interesting—you just know it, and know it’s special, and I’m going to miss living with these people very much. We’re having our last brunch in a few hours, and I’m looking forward to hanging out with them (it’s so, so easy to hang out with anyone here) for a while before we all say goodbye.

So that’s been my summer :). It’s been a good one, despite the hiccups along the way—a lot of research, a lot of learning, lectures, spending time with my program people, eating well, exercising well, planning for the future :). And then on Thursday, I leave… but to go to Italy for a ten-day trip with my grandparents and sisters! The trip is Leslie’s (my middle sister) graduation present from my grandparents, and Nicole (my youngest sister) and I jumped the chance to come along. After that, we’re back home in Minnesota for a few days before my family takes a road trip back to Massachusetts for Wellesley’s orientation. And then, dear readers, the undergraduate summer is concluded and the year can begin again :).

I’m likely not going to be posting next week (given that I’ll be in Italy), but regardless feel free to post questions! I’d love to hear from you, and I’ve made a very good friend (Christine) through the blog before, if you’re interested in that sort of thing :P. And if not, I’ll definitely reply to questions the week after next, and the Facebook page is an excellent resource for speedy responses :).

Happy summer all,

Monica

 

post-script 8/23: (just for some of the last pics from the summer!)