Hey all!
This one’s going to be a short post, what with all the time I’m putting into my thesis and tutoring this week. These things are unrelated, but are both awesome, because I’m actually making progress on my calibration (yessss) and I’m learning Neuro 100 and 200 over again PLUS helping people! And in case you’re interested as to what calibration means in this case, I’m essentially wrestling with the computer monitor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) so that it produces the colors I want in a standardized color space, so that I can actually run an experiment for my thesis. Mostly I tell people I spent the weekend on a couch at HMS, and then get to the words “red, green, and blue guns” and people are like: “Whoa, too much information!” :).
While we know I struggle with remembering what happened this morning, last week notwithstanding, luckily I have pictures to remind me that last week TANNER CONFERENCE happened and Halloween also occurred! (Pretty amusing story on Halloween—I ended up taking the 8pm bus into Boston this Friday night, and everyone was dressed up in costumes and heading to Harvard and MIT. And I’m huddled in a corner seat with Tupperware and clothes on my lap, my laptop on top of that, and my backpack squished against my legs, and another girl wearing jeans takes one look at me and asks, “Can I sit with you?” Something I love about Wellesley is you find all sorts :)).
Tanner Conference occurs on a Tuesday every year, and it’s an opportunity for students to share the work they’ve done over the summer with the Wellesley community. It’s not research-based like Ruhlman Conference in the spring is, but there’s a little bit of everything. This year, I unfortunately had MIT classes in the afternoon so I could only attend the morning, but I had a great time listening to my fellow seniors share how they’d grown and what they accomplish. Amusingly, it just occurred to me now that I remember how in awe I was as a first-year attending Ruhlman, not understanding how the seniors could ever be so accomplished in each of their fields. But I attended mostly friends’ Tanners, and I’ve been watching them change for years, so it’s not a surprise Sebiha spent the summer working in Ethiopia and presenting proposals on health to the government, or that Rebecca worked on treating chikunguyna in the Dominican Republic, or that Isabelle is interested in the exact same thing that I am and used Bayesian models to analyze social cognition problems this summer, or that Blair was coordinating a research project through Amazon Turk. I’ve attached some unflattering pictures of all of them so that you can admire how fantastic they all are, and as always I’m so in love with each of the presenters and the whole of the Wellesley community for finding their interests, pursuing them relentlessly, and then sharing that struggle and joy with us.
That’s all I have for this week—my research proposal awaits before I can go to sleep! (I write these on Sunday or Monday.) I swear I’m like the most boring person ever—research this, research that, sciency-things in this corner, more sciency things there! Except science is awesome and I’m totally going to buy that xkcd tshirt (if you don’t know xkcd, you should read it. It’s comics for nerds.) Also, I’m representing a very important part of the Wellesley community—an absolutely ridiculous component, might I add, in that I couldn’t find a table at 8pm tonight on two floors because apparently everyone loves to hang out in the Science Center. On a Monday night. What.
(So much love for the science majors.)
And now I shall actually sign off :). I hope you all have a great week, and that snow also happens where you are living too!
Cheers,
Monica
Unflattering photos of amazing people coming right up :). This is Isabelle, and we’re like the same person in terms of interests for the future. We’re DEFINITELY going to be colleges, which is why it’s fantastic that we get along so well. She was discussing the work she did at Caltech in the Adolphs lab!
Blair, who did psychology work this summer and who I miss dearly now that I don’t have classes with her anymore. One of her goals was to make us laugh during her scientific presentation, and she succeeded with gusto :).
Sebiha is an amazing, amazing woman. And if I come downstairs at 5pm on a weekday, I can eat dinner with her!
I was kind of awkwardly sitting in the first row of an entire lecture room, but hearing about Rebecca’s goals and where she’s planning to head next is always inspiring. So glad I got to go to her talk.
Tanner Panel!
The majestic Harvard Medical School. Sometimes I walk up to this place, see some imperfect leaves on the ground, and wonder how I exist here.
What I actually do at Harvard Medical School: take notes on post-its. And more post-its. And then paper towels when the post-its run out.
So, for Halloween I dressed up as a person dressed all in black with a cape. This is all the more amusing when you see what my sister Nicole, at home, completely independent of me, dressed up as. (I put on jeans because I was going into Boston and didn’t want to be a complete weirdo. Luckily, there were many other weirdos around in Boston on Halloween night). Me and Tiff– taking pictures together since first year :).
My sister Nicole’s costume. SO AMUSED.
So you know the science majors? (in which I include CS majors?) We’re as a whole extremely nerdy. These two dressed up as Dr. Java, a development environment for running the programming language Java (she has a bucket to throw errors at you), and a Buggle, which is an Object used in our introductory CS class to teach us about object-oriented programming. We’re awesome, duh.
So Tiffany, along with her many skills such as being a super-present sister and family member and captain of the swim team and pre-med and a spanish major and a music minor, also is a senior member of the Guild of Carilloners, meaning she can play the gigantic bells in Galen Tower (Wellesley’s one of the few schools that owns a bell tower and only has students play the carillon). She also composes her own music, because she’s not cool enough. I was supposed to meet her at 7pm but instead I was rapidly shuffling towards the bell tower at 7:10pm and so I got to hear the whole concert outside, where it’s much better quality sound-wise, and had a MOMENT when she started playing a Harry Potter and Phantom of the Opera mash-up and it was dark and Halloween and the Tower was lit up all weird. Why are my friends so great?
Heehee, heading up the stairs. It’s a bit creepy the first time, but the tower totally grows on you.
Still heading up.
And up!
Hi Grace and Tiffany! Already done with the concert I see? I am a fail, but you two are excellent :).