School’s starting starting starting!

Hey dudes :).

I had two serious blogs in a row—gotta break out of the trend! Plus there are so many things happening right now, what with school starting tomorrow. The Wellesley community is flooding back in, the dining halls coming alive with people and chatter. I always watch the we’re-reunited!-run-scream-hug scenes with a solid chunk of incredulousness (not my thing. But I do weirder things so I can’t judge) but it’s also very enjoyable to see that happiness, that sense of coming back home, to do the work we’re meant to do.

We’re also in the path of a blizzard warning, predicted to come through Monday through Wednesday. Everyone is obviously psyched since school might be cancelled. It also snowed on Friday, for the first time all winter, and campus looks beautiful. It makes for hard travelling though—I’m grateful I’m already here.

I can’t find a good way to transition this, so I’m just going to say that my reflection of the evening is that I really miss talking to prospies (prospective Wellesley students). The blog used to take comments, but we closed that off at the beginning of the year due to the truly prodigious amounts of spam coming in. And it was rare to get a comment anyway, since I agree with you all in that I’m a strong proponent of the read-but-don’t-reach-out policy both because it’s scary and also too much work. I do miss talking to y’all though and giving advice. Because obviously I do not have an easy forum for giving advice at my disposal.

Maybe I should host a prospie during Spring Open Campus—that’s always a fun time, and I wouldn’t have been here without my wonderful Spring Open Campus experience. I was dead-set on attending a larger school in New York, and then by the first night of Spring Open Campus, I called my parents and told them I was coming here. The students were so welcoming, the classes small and engaging, and I have a debt to give back to the community. On the other hand, the last time I hosted a prospie, sophomore year, I scared her away from Wellesley. I promise I didn’t mean to. But she ended up telling the Admissions Office, who ended up telling my swim coach, and I ended up getting scolded for giving her the impression that Wellesley was “all work, no play.” I didn’t mean it! I had been describing how I like my life—lots of work, with small intense social activities interspersed—and that’s fun for me, but there are a lot of people on this campus and we all have different lifestyles. But—if you do happen to think you could gain something from me, please send an email to the Admissions Office with “forward to Monica Gates,” or request me for Spring Open Campus (you can do that, request hosts) because I’d really like to spend some time with a few of you.

Topic change. My room is colorful. Last semester I was determined to decorate my room, because it’s a massive room with lots of bare walls, and I went through the entire semester thinking I was going to do it and then I was too busy to do it. (Last semester was crazy. I will always remember last semester as crazy.) But I have now plastered by walls with super-saturated colors! I will post pictures, as an example of a college dorm room. Note that I have a single (given to juniors and seniors) and that it’s very large, especially the way I’ve organized it. Also, there are a lot of people on campus with a lot more taste than I have, and some of the rooms here (and the way people dress, wow) are incredible.

 (Topic change again) I was musing on what I’ve been doing with my research life in college, and I came to a nice summary conclusion: I study globs. I’ve actually been studying globs ever since my sophomore year, on-and-off but consistently, and that’s quite cool, that I’ve had a continual research project studying glob neurons. Globs are clusters of cells in the inferior temporal cortex (IT) of the brain, and they are groups of color-selective cells, which mean that if you show someone some colors, those cells are going to pass electric signals to one another and be excited. I’ve been studying the globs’ properties since fall of sophomore year, since I’m in a color lab and we’re interested in what parts of the brain represent color, and how they do it. Why the name “globs”, you ask? The story is that Prof. Conway, my research mentor, was involved in the globs’ discovery. (There is proof of this—this is not the contentious part of the story. See “Conway, B. R., Moeller, S., & Tsao, D. Y. (2007). Specialized color modules in macaque extrastriate cortex. Neuron, 56(3), 560-573” and many other papers noting the existence of glob cells before then, but not referring to them as “globs” by name.) (Side note: this paper is known as “Conway 2007” on my Desktop and I have opened it so many times that if it were paper and not a pdf it would have fallen apart by now.) Prof. Conway and others named these globs after the blobs in early-visual-area V1, where the blobs are clusters of other color selective cells in this huge visual area in the back of the brain that feeds information to IT. Why “blobs”, you ask? Apparently, Dr. David Hubel, Dr. Conway’s mentor and Nobel laureate, decided that those cells should be called blobs, and so he and Dr. Torsten Wiesel (also Nobel laureate) named them blobs. Which is why they are now known in the literature as blobs. I’m sure there is information missing from this story—for example, Wikipedia says Margaret Wong-Riley was the first to discover blobs— and that I’m missing a lot of contributors’ names. On the other hand, lab gossip says that there’s some underlying truth to it, and just how cool is that? Lab gossip = awesome, and I study globs.

My final note for the evening will be what classes I am taking for my last semester at Wellesley College (whoa, that’s weird.) In a strange turn of events, I am actually not taking any “normal” classes at Wellesley this semester. My thesis counts as a Wellesley class, and then I am taking two classes at MIT. This is unusual, for a few reasons.

First, a full course load is four classes. I have been taking five for a while, if you count research (and research does count as a class if you choose the full-time option, which is 10-12 hours a week). Most science students who are seriously involved in undergraduate research do take five classes (including research) plus the labs associated with classes, because we’re usually pre-med or pre-grad or double-majoring or crazy. However, most thesising students only take four classes (including their thesis) because the thesis takes up a lot of time. I decided to still take five classes last semester, which you already know the result of.

I think that gives me justification for only taking three classes (including my thesis) this spring, though it sets me under the normal course load. So that’s one unusual part. The other unusual part is that I’m taking two classes at MIT. Wellesley students are only allowed to take half of their classes at MIT for any given semester, biased towards the Wellesley side. The class I really want to take this semester is Introduction to Machine Learning, which is not offered at Wellesley. Unfortunately, once you’re signed up for one of MIT’s science classes, you’re in serious trouble for your Wellesley scheduling, because MIT’s on a M/W/F and T/Th schedule, and Wellesley’s on a M/Th and T/W/F schedule, which means you’re going to miss class one day of the week no matter what you schedule. (This is why taking classes at MIT and Wellesley only works if you’re taking afternoon seminars or non-science classes at either location.) So the other class I want to take is Linear Algebra, which I would rather take at Wellesley, but scheduling means it would only work if I took it at MIT.

I explained this to Dean Stephan, who has been absolutely wonderful about all of my issues over the years (I see her every semester for one reason or another, which is more than most people see their dean.) She looked over my previous student history and on that basis she agreed to grant me another “exception” semester, allowing me to enroll in two MIT classes even though I only have one Wellesley class. Time-wise, I’m still going to spend just as much time on my Wellesley schoolwork as my MIT schoolwork (the thesis never ends!). But I’m extremely grateful that it’s going to work on the administratively side.

There are two reasons why I’m describing this so carefully. The first is that many Wellesley students come in with an expectation that they’ll be able to break Wellesley’s academic requirements if they need to. This is not the case. As a first-year when I tried to make “exceptions” for myself I was not successful, and the only reason I am successful now is because I have a good academic record that shows I am capable of what I suggest in terms of course load. The second reason is that many of these rules are flexible, if you show that you are capable. That the people at Wellesley are understanding, supportive, and ready to help in every way they can to make sure we are able to access all of our possible opportunities. I went into my Dean’s office worried I’d have to find a pass/fail Wellesley class to take, and instead within two minutes she was shooing me out the door with an exception email sent to the Registrar asserting that signing up for zero classes this week would be perfectly fine. It’s an incredible school, and this is only one of the many, many times all sorts of adults on campus have (and often gone out of their way to) ease my path to goals and opportunities.

Which is all to say that my classes don’t start until next week since I’m on MIT’s schedule, but I’m still going to go to bed early anyway because SCHOOL IS IN SESSION! I’m unduly excited—last semester at college, I can’t believe it. I don’t know when it’ll actually hit me, since I already have plenty of things to occupy my attention, but maybe it’ll just keep on coming up in small bursts over the semester, when I’m talking to friends, eating food in the dining halls, applying for jobs, searching for apartments.

That’s all I have, readers. Wishing you the best, and snow!

Monica