Hello readers!
I cannot express how much fun it is to be back at Wellesley. There’s just so much to do! I’m back to struggling to remember that century ago when I woke up this morning…
To give the both of us a break, I’m not going to begin another epic of a post—congrats if you read the one from last week, truly, because that thing clocked in around 5300 words. It took me so long to write that I’ve been telling everyone my trip to Nicaragua was fabulous, and please go read my blog post because I’m much more eloquent and long-winded there. Meanwhile, it is absolutely delightful to see all of my friends again. I’m pretty much on vacation right now, since most of my classes are at M.I.T. and MIT doesn’t start until next week, so I’ve been making the most of it by spending hours catching up with people over meals and in the middle of hallways.
In other news in Monica-world, my academic life is going excellently: I’m well on my way to being enrolled in four classes! I had some spectacularly bad scheduling luck last semester, when three of the classes I need as pre-requisites for a class next fall were all scheduled at the same time. However, I have exported them all to MIT, where my professors there assure me I have a spot! I’m thrilled, and fully forgive the scheduling gods, because taking three classes at MIT and only heading over to Boston on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays is almost impossibly good luck. You’ll be hearing about Physics II, Introduction to Probability and Statistics, and Introduction to Computational Neuroscience when MIT classes start on Tuesday!
Back at Wellesley, I’ve gotten into Advanced Fiction Writing, which was my top choice for my “fun class” that I take every semester (science classes are fun too, don’t you worry). I just squeezed into from the waitlist, and I am, again, thrilled. My goal is to write an hour a day this whole semester, and though I doubt it will hold, I’ve been enjoying myself so far. I’m slightly worried about trying to write a short story (somehow, my short stories always end up ballooning into a length that can be loosely described as ‘way too long to read, Monica’) but I’m so pleased that I have the opportunity to try. Since Nicaragua, I’ve been trying to incorporate more things that I enjoy into my life. Erin was commenting that some of the other changes are a bit odd—for example, I’ve covered my mirror in post-its—but on the whole, I feel calmer and more centered.
Speaking of mindset, I had my best-ever conversation with Professor Conway yesterday morning. We were talking about what I was going to do this summer (research, certainly, but through which program?) and what I was going to do about graduate school (apply in the fall? Take a year or two off to work as a research technician first?) And he said something that resonated with me: “Stop thinking of graduate school as a credential, Monica, and think of it as a journey.” He tells me wise things like this often, but this time I was finally in a position to listen. I got what he was saying—that I should follow the opportunities that allow me to do the kind of research that I enjoy, and not worry about anything else. That I should just follow what excites me, because that’s what the grad school committees—and life—care about anyway. People have been advising me of this for ages (with increasing stages of exasperation,) but this time it struck home, was a revelation, has changed the way I think about the future. Suddenly my life is wide-open again, not structured and pressured—I never realized how tightly I had coiled that part of myself until it was freed.
Research in the Conway lab has been fun this week. We had lab meeting on Wednesday, and then on Thursday I spent most of the day working with Evelyn and Jane, sorting through how to process an anatomical scan. Most of the time I process fMRI scans (functional magnetic resonance imaging scans), which are MRI scans tracking blood flow while a subject is performing a task. However, fMRI scans are low resolution, and you occasionally need to take an anatomical MRI scan of a brain (which are taken while the subject is lying very still) to obtain higher-order images of a brain. The computational methods involved in processing an anatomical MRI scan compared to an fMRI scan are slightly different, and figuring out how to do both is the project most of the younger people in the Conway lab (Evelyn, me, Alison, Isabelle) have been working on for the past few months. We’re finally approaching an end point, but we called in Jane yesterday to help us work it through some hurdles on the Linux system.
Related to programming, my first day as tutor in the CS 112: Introduction to Matlab class went wonderfully. It pleases me immensely when I can help someone understand something new, and though I was just assisting the teacher on Wednesday, I’m very excited to host my own drop-in-hours on Wednesday evenings. Moreover, since assignments are due on Thursday, I’m anticipating full participation in my tutoring hours :P. I’ll let you know if it gets hectic, but for now I’m just naively excited :).
And that’s all I’ll inflict on you today! This afternoon I’m off to explore MIT, to figure out where I can eat things, print things, and attend class, all the essentials of being a newbie student. Then I’ll head over to Harvard Medical School, when they often feed their students burritos during 5pm Beer Hour :).
Thanks for reading, and comments and questions are welcome as always!
Monica
I had an impromtu Wellesley admissions tour this morning! Maggie, our tour guide, did a phenomenal job– I’d had a class with her first-year, but was not surprised to learn how little I knew about her. Wellesley women continue to inspire :).