A Wellesley Neuroscience Major

Hello readers!

When I was brushing my teeth this morning, musing on possible topics for this week’s blog post (a disturbingly routine Friday morning activity for me), I realized that I’ve never talked about the details of my major. While I’m not sure you really want to hear about everything I don’t talk about here, neuroscience is a happily growing major at Wellesley, and I do hope to recruit as many of the Class of 2018 as possible to the dark side. In that spirit, in this post I’m hoping to walk you through how you pursue a neuro major at Wellesley. And I’ll put in my plug for please-leave-comments-and-questions! early, because while I think my major is interesting, I also think talking about Pokémon is interesting, and that’s pretty much all we need to know about that :).

So. You want to be a neuroscience major! Actually, it takes some time to even get that far, but most potential neuro majors take Neuro 100, Introduction to Neuroscience, and then work from there. I took Neuro 100 with Prof. Conway, and by the end of the course had decided that of the possible chemistry, biology, and neuroscience majors I was considering, I was definitely going to be a neuro major. Wellesley’s major deadline isn’t until the end of sophomore year (or the middle of sophomore year if you’re going abroad), but I find that people generally decide if they’re going to be a science major or not fairly early. Once you dedicate your life to living in the Science Center, it’s not hard to switch between majors, because the first two years are all about intro classes. And if you’re a pre-med student, required to take a lot of introductory science classes, neuroscience is an excellent choice; in fact, the admissions website says that neuroscience is about 60% pre-med students, which I’d definitely believe!

What I love most about Wellesley’s neuro major it is that it’s incredibly interdisciplinary. We don’t actually take a lot of neuro classes—instead, we mostly take classes in different but related departments. Basically, if you’re a neuro major you must choose at least two of the three offered concentrations: loosely biology, psychology, or computational. It all makes much more sense if you look at Wellesley’s neuroscience requirements, of which I’ve stolen a screenshot from Wellesley’s Neuro page :).

As you can see, we’re all required to take some core classes: Neuro 100, 200, 300, intro molecular bio (Bio 110/112) and intro statistics (Psych 205, aka Psych Stats). The circled blue selections are the classes I’ve taken— I really should have gotten around to taking Psych Stats by now, but you can’t take Neuro 300 until you’re a senior. Neuro 300 is the capstone neuro course here, where we write a practice research grant and prepare ourselves for future jobs. I’ve heard it’s an excellent course for transitioning to leave Wellesley; and I’m excited to take it next year in the fall.

Neuro 100 is our intro course, and it’s generally quite rigorous. We cover a good portion of Bear’s Neuroscience in class, and there’s an attached practicum (which is like a lab but only half the time length), which also has impressive scope. I don’t know of many students outside of Wellesley who know basic brain anatomy as well as we do, because we spend hours dissecting and locating parts on sheep brains. That knowledge is proving useful in my research now, and I find that many of the lessons from Neuro 100 are applicable in all of my classes.

Then we get into the electives :). As it says in very small font up above, “Choose three courses from at least 2 of the 3 groupings.” This applies to both 200-level courses as well as 300-level courses, so we all get to experience the differences between Cellular and Molecular (mostly bio), Cognitive (mostly psych), and Systems and Computational Neuroscience (mostly computational). I’ve mainly chosen to concentrate in the latter of the two options, and I don’t plan to take any Cellular and Molecular 300-level courses. Here’s the translation of the courses I did take: Chem 211 + Lab (Organic Chemistry 1); Psych 217 (Cognition); Math 215 (Math for the Sciences, i.e. Differential Equations/Linear Algebra/Multivariable); CS 332 (Biological and Computational Vision); Neuro 320 (Vision and Art). You would think I’d have taken more classes in this list, but it takes some time to take all the pre-requisite courses for those listed :).

At the very bottom, you can see I’ve circled Neuro 250 :). That list at the bottom shows the independent research courses, of which most neuro majors end up taking at least one. It’s quite common for most science majors to be involved in labs at Wellesley, and these courses allow us to get academic credit for our lab work. Neuro 250/350 assumes between 10-12 hours a week, Neuro 250H/350H between 5-6 hours a week, and Neuro 360/370 are for thesising seniors.

So how is it being a science or neuroscience major at Wellesley? Though everything’s not perfect, it’s still great enough to rave :). Here are some things that define a science major’s experience; hopefully many are familiar from previous posts!

–       Solidarity. There’s something about being a science major in a majority liberal arts college that makes you all band together :). I know by face many of the science majors, and I know by name a good portion of my year. I encounter new people in every science class I take, but I never walk into an entirely unfamiliar crowd.

–       Psets and tests, not essays! Well, there’s lot of debate on this one, but having problem sets rather than essays is a defining part of being a science major (and something I rather enjoy :)). Grab a table in the Science Center and a buddy and get working on them; it’s something that undoubtedly draws us together.

–       All-women! This is something I really admire about Wellesley; STEM courses can easily become male-dominated. I think that having only women in all my science courses has built up an expectation and confidence in me that will extend the rest of my career.

–       Labs. Wellesley has 3.5 hours labs that meet every week, and that’s something non-science majors don’t experience. It makes planning classes and activities more difficult, but you meet new people and do science you’d never have the opportunity to do in class.

–       Pre-meds! Okay, I’ll admit I love pre-meds. A lot of my friends are pre-med, and as a whole they’re hard-working and ambitious. Basically, I enjoy spending time most of the people in the sciences, and I’m always happy to hang out with friends from classes.

–       Research. Our research opportunities are beyond awesome. The mentorship from professors, from peers… get me talking about research and I can go for ages. Also, a kudos to the senior thesis program :).

–       Summer research! Heh, did you know that if you do research over the year, there’s a good chance you can do research over the summer? And then you have a job, can stay at Wellesley, hang out with all your labmates, go to all the summer enrichment programs, interact extensively with faculty, and never leave! … I love our summer research program :).

–       Small class sizes! There are no gigantic lecture halls here. Everyone’s free to ask questions during class, and that’s an extremely important element of my learning.

–       Lots of support. From professors, and especially peer support. I didn’t realize how much emphasis we put on peer support until I’ve been comparing with MIT. We have a lot of peer tutors, and peer tutoring sessions, and peer help rooms—and I still talk with many of my previous tutors.

–       Liberal arts. When you’re tired of science, you can just walk outside the door! And then there’s a multitude of well-spoken, passionate, non-science peers all around. Wellesley never lets you get stuck in what you do; we’re constantly immersed in an environment that encourages us to expand our horizons and learn from one another.

–       And finally, you get to study science! Because science is awesome, and you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t. Our classes are vigorous and enjoyable and we learn mountains of information; I wouldn’t ever give up the learning :).

And that’s what I have on being a neuroscience major! I hope it was helpful, and comments and questions are very welcome. Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great Friday! Best wishes,

Monica