Senior Year

 

 

Hello all!

… It has been a busy week. It kind of sprung up on me too—I was going along last week, doing work but still being sort of inefficient about it, and then last Saturday I sat down and wrote out what needed to be done and concluded: “Well. That’s a bit horrifying.”

So, cue Monica in uber-efficient mode! I’m not a big fan of uber-efficient mode, because I’m not actually that inefficient in general. What it comes down to is that I don’t sleep quite as much, I don’t talk to people quite as much, and I cut out any mind-wandering (but not exercise. Exercise is essential to Monica’s happiness.) Everything becomes more back-to-back. Luckily for me, I love everything that I’m doing this semester—which means that this isn’t a particularly stressful situation, just busy. On Tuesday I was laying in my bed, reviewing what I’d done that day and planning for the next, when I started laughing because it was still Tuesday. Days are eternities, man!

Thankfully, yesterday I got to go back to my usual working mode because two of my assignments got pushed back and I am forever grateful. I hope you don’t mind me spelling out what I’ve been working on this week—I can’t believe I was able to get so much (though not everything) accomplished!

First thing first: Churchill!

The Churchill Scholarship! I think I told you I was applying for the Churchill Scholarship last week. Let me tell you, applying for scholarships is like signing on for another class. This one was even harder for me because not only did I have to do a lot of searching in the scientific literature, trying to understand particle filters enough to write a research proposal on them, but I had to write a personal statement.

I have learned so much about myself by finishing that personal statement. I’ve figured out what general area of science I want to pursue. I’ve made a list of what labs I want to apply for in the spring. Most importantly, I’ve confirmed for myself that this—doing research—is what I want to do. I’ve wanted to become a science professor since high school, but my understanding of what that job entails has changed so much since my initial conception. Every once in a while, I reevaluate myself, check that that’s indeed what I want to be doing, and consequently freak out and decide that I don’t want to. …And then, layer by layer, I figure out why I wanted to do it in the first place, what I still like about it, what I’ve grown to like more about it since the last time I checked, and by the time I’m finished with this process, I am so much stronger in my position that this is where I want to be in the future.

So I’d say that a good portion of last week was writing those essays, or more accurately, figuring out what to write in those essays. And getting them corrected, and dealing with the criticism by questioning myself, and emerging stronger. I’ve still got a ways to go yet. The Churchill interview for Wellesley’s internal review is on Thursday, and they advise us it’s supposed to be stressful. No matter how it goes, this has been the most informative application process I’ve ever done.

Second things first: Research!

… Yeah, you might notice that classes haven’t even appeared yet. That’s the main reason why this week has been so crazy—I kept on putting classes off so I could do the Churchill Scholarship and research. And then it built up and I was caught off guard. Recommendation to people who are thesising: really, just do as they say and take the three classes instead of four. But I really, really love every one of my classes (and I just dropped one, which was incredible, and I’m so sad about that), so I’m just trying really hard to do everything!

Yay! Research is actually the most fun it’s ever been. I didn’t want to thesis for a while (…there are still those days :)), but I’ve realized how much I value the sense of ownership it gives me. In Prof. Conway’s lab, students are given the opportunity to bounce around between projects, which I’ve definitely taken advantage of. However, that means that unlike many of my science friends, I didn’t come into this fall with an existing project on which I’d already worked extensively. Which really means: what am I thesising on? And that’s something you want to figure out sooner rather than later :).

For a while “all your balls were in the air,” as two of my advisors told me wryly. Happily most of them are hovering near the ground now. For the fall part of my thesis, I am doing a psychophysics experiment (fancy word for behavioral study) on the Bezold–Brücke shift, which basically means that the color you perceive changes depending on the luminance of that color. Like, if I was looking at a color and I called it “blue” at low luminance (almost equivalent to brightness), then when I made that color high luminance I might call it “green.” I can get more technical than that if you like (there’s going to be an undergraduate thesis on it in the Wellesley library at the end of the year, if all goes well :)) but what I’m really excited about it that I get to do a behavioral study with real, live human participants. I’m really excited, guys. Once I figure out how to get the computer working and Matlab working on the computer and calibrate the colors and write the script and deal with all of the miscellaneous issues along the way, then I can get real live people doing this study!

:):):). So excited.

There’s a spring part to this thesis too involving computational modeling, and there’s also a project in parallel this fall going on with DTI. That’s the hovering part of the equation, and I’ll get back to you on how that goes.

Third things! Classes.

Finally, time for class! I’m taking 9.66 at MIT–you pronounce it “nine six six” if you don’t want to sound like a dork there. The 9 stands for Course 9—MIT calls their majors “courses,” and Course 9 is the Brain and Cognitive Sciences major. 9.66 is Computational Cognitive Science.

In this class, we don’t have any tests—rather just four psets and a final project! I find that’s a trend in almost all of my classes this year—I have a total of four tests over the entire semester, which is astonishing.

The first pset (“problem set”—assignments for math or science classes, and this is the term used at both MIT and Wellesley) was due on Friday. We implemented a baby computational model, based off one of the papers that our professor had published for his PhD. It actually took a lot less time than I expected, though psets always rack up at least ten hours for me. Psets are also made a little more difficult by the fact that if I want to go to office hours, I either have to plan it so that I can go when I’m already at MIT, or I have to make a special visit to Boston to go to an hour of help room. I usually end up doing both :).

I also had a pset due for 9.71. I don’t think I’ve told you that I dropped Professor Wilmer’s class: “Brains, Genes, and Individual Variations” at Wellesley in order to take “9.71 Functional MRI of the Human Brain”. I was incredibly sad to drop Professor Wilmer’s class—the subject matter is fascinating, and Professor Wilmer is exemplary—but I’m also so happy I was able to join Professor Kanwisher’s 9.71 class at MIT. I thought I knew the basics of fMRI, which is a technique we use in Prof. Conway’s lab, but it took me approximately two lectures to understand a) how much I didn’t, and b) how fMRI is way cooler than I had ever realized. This class is presentation-based, research paper-based, and writing-based, not to mention how informative the lectures are. AND it’s a seminar, which means there are only 12 of us. In short, I’m having a great time, and thus needed to make sure I was submitting the highest quality work possible :).

(Note: I just had a meeting with Professor Wilmer today, who welcomed me to come to his office hours even after I told him why I was dropping his class. He is magical as always, and I’m so glad I’m still able to work with him.)

I also had a pset for my Wellesley class, CS 230 or Data Structures! Computer science psets always take forever—the norm is about 10-12 hours, and really, that’s a completely normal amount of time that all of us allocate to these weekly psets. This is the reason why there’s such a high attrition rate for people who don’t like CS—it’s an incredible amount of work. But everyone in CS 230 is here because they love the material, and it shows. Moreover, in CS 230 we do something called “partner programming”—where you aren’t allowed to write any code without your partner sitting next to you. I thought it would be a disaster (I’m not really a group person in terms of homework), but it’s actually been lovely. You get to know your partner really well, the programming goes much faster, and you generally feel better about the pset all the way through. So that was a chunk of time :).

I also had two presentations for Neuro 300 (capstone senior neuroscience class). Very luckily for me, the second presentation (the larger one, where I and a partner are presenting for the whole class period) was pushed off until next week. I did the tiny one, which was just four minutes of talking, and prepared for the class discussion. I’ll be starting the big presentation this weekend.

Fourth: miscellaneous stuff!

Happily, there’s no such thing as a week without miscellaneous stuff. This week, I did two major other things: led a Journal Club meeting, and helped interview a staff member for the Dean’s Office.

Journal Club is a biweekly meeting for members of the lab to read a research paper relevant to our work and discuss it. It fits under the “Research” umbrella, but it’s completely unregulated by Prof. Conway, and it’s the responsibility of the senior undergraduate member of the lab. That’d be me in this case, and so I figured I probably had to lead our first discussion :).

It was definitely the best discussion I’ve ever led, and my favorite JClub we’ve had in my years here. Not that it was my best presentation (far from it—I was rushed for time), but I really enjoy the vibe we have from the people in the lab right now. Galen, Evelyn, Oana, and Emma all were there—and most of us have spent the summer together, and though Oana and Emma are new, they have the enthusiasm to fit right in. So everyone was comfortable enough to offer opinions and ask questions, and it was that rare combination of productive, social, and fun all at the same time.

The second miscellaneous thing I did this week didn’t take long at all—but it was somewhat unusual, so I thought I’d mention it :). Since I work for the Admissions Office as a blogger, sometimes I get to do Admissions Office activities like serve on panels for prospective students. However, I didn’t realize that working as an Ask-Me for Orientation put me on the Dean’s Office and First-Year Office’s list of students-to-contact as well! In this case, I helped interview a candidate for one of the Dean’s Office administrative positions. It was informative, because I have almost zero practice with interviews, and it was great to see someone who was obviously practiced at it perform. Moreover, this is the first interview I’ve been at where “strong interpersonal skills” has been an essential requirement of the job—take that as you will, though I thought it was funny :).

 

And we’re done!

And that, readers, has been my week. A busy one, for sure, and I didn’t quite manage everything, but it could have gone much worse than it did. And I’ve been having a good time regardless—I was talking to a friend today, and she was telling me she didn’t want to go to French class, and I was like: I want to go to all of my classes! And that’s kind of a novel feeling, because at this point I’m not doing any classes because of requirements, I’m doing them because I really, really want to be there, so much so that I fought to get into almost every one of them and am still taking them despite the fact that I probably should be doing less.

It’s a truly wonderful life, and I can’t believe it’s mine right now. I have so many people, always, to thank, for getting me here and making all of this happen. I couldn’t have imagined it in high school :).

Please contact me with questions and comments, and I hope you all have a great (ha, I usually tell people “productive”) weekend!

:),

Monica