Hello readers!
Oof, it’s set out to be a busy two weeks! I’ve finally hit mid-term season (which happened to a bunch of my friends last week—I don’t envy them), this Friday’s my organic chemistry midterm, and next week are my computer science and neuroscience midterms. As such, my days are getting planned by the hour so that I can try to fit all the studying in :). Of course, I really should be doing all of my readings the day they’re assigned, but that never seems to happen, what with projects and assignments and whatnot…
Last week, however (man, it’s kind of odd writing on a Monday), was busy for non-academic reasons (yay!) When given lots of extra time, my plan seems to be to spend more time with people at meals, and then drastically increase my time attending lectures :). I went to some excellent lectures last week, the most inspiring of which was the Alumni Achievement Awards. I’ll give some details of that event in a few paragraphs!
Last week was also when my summer planning transitioned to stage two: acceptances and rejections. The last two months were all about the applications (and I’m either done or have one left, haven’t decided yet), but this week I had two acceptances come in! I was then stuck in the happy position of needing to choose between options. Of course, being me, it turned into a rather huge affair with lots of tears and reevaluation of my future, etc. I’m not quite ready to reflect on my experience with that yet, because it was an emotionally intense response, and yet such a great problem to have. My conclusion for now is: I’m growing so much every semester, and I have for my whole life up to this point… I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an adult where “who I am” is a much more known and defined entity!
My neuroscience project is also moving onto stage two: data analysis. In Neuro 320 (Vision and Art), we have the awesome assignment of creating our own experiment, collecting data, then writing a report on it. It’s hard to overstate how amazing this opportunity is, because we’re acting as real scientists, completely in control and responsible for running an experiment addressing any question regarding vision that we want. Professor Conway looked over our research proposals, but we’re on our own for data collection and analysis, so this is an independent project worth 15% of our grade at the end of the semester. I’ve just finished testing my subjects—nine of my friends volunteered to help me out, and I did my best to feed them as a little something extra :).
For some detail on my project, I was originally planning to look at eye color. (Did you know that 1/6 of the US population has blue eyes, but 2/3s of the population think blue is the prettiest eye color? I don’t have a citation for this, and am not pleased… gah, science training :)). But then I went to an optional session on how to the use the eye tracker, and was promptly hooked. The eye tracker is a camera that sends out an infrared beam at the user’s eye, when the user is sitting in a chair staring at a screen behind the camera. This infrared beam tracks corneal reflection (a measure of head movement), and pupillary reflection (a measure of eye movement). It also can track eye dilation and all sorts of cool things, but I’m only using the corneal and pupillary reflections.
On the screen behind the camera, I show a powerpoint with lots of pictures, record the subjects’ eye movements, and then analyze via Matlab. I spent all day yesterday poking about on Matlab (actually, reading “Matlab for Neuroscientists,” because I’m trying to figure out how to do stats with poisson and kernel distributions for my SERP research), and finishing recording my subjects, who have to stare at the screen for 8-10 minutes. Thank you so much to all of them; my project is on food priming, so I give them many kudos for looking at food pictures and not getting annoyed they weren’t going to get to eat any of it :). Personally, I found their interpretations of the purpose of the experiment the most fascinating part of the process.
Wow, I just spent three paragraphs talking about my science project… and I’m always defensive about how I can hold my own in the humanities :). Then again, in the beginning of the semester I tried to take Moral Philosophy, and had to drop it after the first day. On other hand, I finally looked up what “Epistemology and Cognition” means, which is a category we have to fulfill for our distribution requirements at Wellesley. I’ve never had to worry about it, because neuro is “epistemology and cognition,” but apparently epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the acquisition of knowledge. So therefore I am a well-balanced soul who is taking advantage of the Wellesley liberal arts education—heehee, well, I’ll for sure take a humanities class next semester :).
Ps, quick note: I don’t believe that the sciences and humanities are mutually exclusive, and it occasionally annoys me when people are pegged as “science people” or “humanities people.” Everything does, however, have a grain of truth.
Now, though, I’d like to tell you about the wonderful ceremony I attended: the Alumni Achievement Awards. Every year, Wellesley selects a small number of its alumni who have “brought honor to themselves and Wellesley College through their outstanding achievements.” Looking at the list of past recipients, which of course includes Secretary Albright and Clinton, alumni like the writer of the Nancy Drew books (no way. Those were an integral part of my childhood!), and the four 2013 recipients, I am not surprised that this is the highest award Wellesley has to offer. I don’t know how else to say it: these people are impressive.
I didn’t actually know any of this before I came to the awards ceremony, so I showed up in jeans and almost kicked myself out when I saw what everyone else was wearing. I had seen a poster in the Science Center advertising the event, so I thought it was just another lecture. False. This was a big deal—the Wellesley Blue notes sung, the Wellesley Choir sung, President Bottomly was there, the President of the Alumni Association was there, and these four astounding women were there: Barbara Lubin Goldsmith ’53 (Author, Preservationist, Philanthropist), Marilyn Koenick Yalom ’54 (Mentor Feminist Scholar, Cultural Historian), Callie Crossley ’73 (Journalist, Producer, Commentator), and Diana Farmer ’77 (Pediatric-Fetal Surgeon, Teacher).
After listing all of the accomplishments of the recipients (which included interviewing Picasso, the writing of many, many books, founding the field of fetal surgery, moving America from acid-based paper to non-acid based, receiving France’s Officier des Palmes Academiques, an Emmy, the production of an Oscar-nominated documentary, swaths of awards, and accolades for extensive mentorship), the recipients themselves gave speeches. I won’t replicate them all here—they were much too full for that—but I wanted to mention some of the themes.
Conveniently enough, all of these women were great enough speakers that they drew on each others’ speeches, improvising and coalescing overall themes for us! I’ve never experienced improvised integration to that extent before, and I think that it has several roots. First, these are extremely accomplished women. Second, they are all famed for their roles as mentors. And third, these women, especially the older women, possessed wisdom. My environment is one where the vast majority of people are under the age of 40, so I don’t often encounter people who have mostly lived their lives, who look backwards to the bulk of their accomplishments instead of forwards. Not that these women have stopped working, but this unusual sense of a life lived struck me as I listened. Maybe that’s what wisdom is, having experienced so much that one has had time to reflect and understand a greater whole.
It was easier to connect to the younger women, just because times have changed greatly, from the expectation of a ring after college, to instead a medical school degree. Even so, all of the women had common themes, and passed them down to us to use as we wished.
First, spirit. Wellesley taught them discipline, and it taught them spirit. Speak out when you need to, stand up for yourself, talk yourself into that job, know what you want and drive for it. Callie Crossley told a hilarious story of how she made her way up through the journalist business. It started out with her sitting outside a boss’s office at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, dressed up but without an appointment, and ready to jump up and politely demand an interview as soon as he walked out that door.
Second, persistence. You are going to fail. You are not going to get into what you thought you were going to get into, and things are not going to go as planned. But you must not quit, even when people are against you or the task you’ve set out to accomplish are enormous. With discipline, hard work, and persistence, you can do anything.
Third, and my favorite: openness. All of these themes link together, and this was one that Diana Farmer particularly pressed home for me. She failed to become a Rhodes Scholar, because she was in an accident and couldn’t attend the interview. She failed to become a marine biologist, which was her major at Wellesley. She failed to get into surgery once in medical school. She failed to get into the lab she wanted to after medical school. And yet, here she was, a world-famous surgeon in pediatric-fetal surgery, because though her life took many twists and turns, she looked to each opportunity with openness, and they brought her to where she was today. This was the theme that was most true for all of the speakers—none of them ended up where they had anticipated. Barbard Goldsmith said to treat every job as a ladder, because you never know what might come out if it if you work hard. She also said the causes will find you, not you find them. They all had winding paths, but they said, looking back, they could find the connections in their travels. Looking back, they could explain how life had led them to where they are, though they wouldn’t have had a dream of guessing when they had begun.
All of these themes are inspirational, but the last one made it onto my wall in my dorm room. Being open—isn’t this the most reassuring message you can ever receive? Don’t worry about the future, because it’s not going to happen as you plan it anyway. Don’t be afraid when you don’t get what you want, because you’ll find something great in it regardless. As Professor Conway says, it doesn’t matter what you do, just how you do it. And I think I’ll end there, because there’s no message I can share with you that would, at this moment, resonate with me more.
Best to you all, and I love comments and questions!
Monica
Alumni Achievement Awards