Spring Break!

Hey all!

HAPPY DECISION LETTER DAY!!! I’m wishing the best for all of you.

I’m writing you right now from San Jose, California, where I’m hanging out with my friends Tiffany and Gabby in my uncle Bill’s condo. (This would not be Bill Gates—though I am occasionally asked, this uncle Bill is on my mom’s side :)). We’re hanging out here for a week for Wellesley’s Spring Break, in a location where there is not snow on the ground! It has been fantastic—we came out here with the sole goal of hiking, and we’ve averaged about five miles a day since we’ve arrived :).

This is actually our second trip out here—my sophomore year, Gabby, Tiffany, Suman and I all stayed here for Spring Break as well. Suman is currently traveling abroad in France, but it was so nice to get the gang together again for another trip our senior year :). It kind of feels like a movie, when the college friends go on road trips (and we’ve been on quite a few of those up to New Hampshire since I’ve come to New England as well :)).

Gabby and Tiffany arrived on Thursday, and I got here on Saturday since MIT has a slightly different Spring Break schedule than Wellesley does. I actually had a fantastic two days in Boston before I joined Tiff and Gabby—I had unusually lucky scientific circumstances, though I haven’t been lacking in science since I’ve come to San Jose, since my uncle Nick is a scientist at Agilent Technologies and he’s been telling us all about his work!

On Thursday, I was walking into Building 46 at MIT—this is the Brain and Cognitive Science building, and is my home base of operations whenever I’m at MIT. I was idly eyeing the TV display on the wall where they show upcoming events, and “Lecture by Dr. Tom Griffiths” flashed up, as I had seen maybe a week ago as well. So, deciding I needed to know the date so I could write it down, I stood myself in front of the screen and waited for it to come up again… only to discover it was that Thursday at 4pm! The feeling when you really want to attend something, it happens to be the day of, AND you’re actually available is very satisfying.

Dr. Griffiths’s talk was amazing as expected. He does computational cognitive modeling at UC Berkeley, and was one of the people I was poring over when I was in the process of applying for lab technician positions. (As a side note, the process of applying for those positions was an incredibly useful exercise. It helped me develop a sense of the network of people who do computational cognitive science work—who the leaders are, how they are related, where their previous students are located, what branches exist in the field… it has also allowed me to recognize names like Dr. Griffiths’s off-hand.) To discuss Bayesian modeling, he began by discussing some of his previous work as a graduate student with Dr. Tenenbaum. I had happily seen some of this work before as a student in Dr. Tenenbaum’s Computational Cognitive Science class last fall. Dr. Griffiths then moved into his main points, discussing how information is changed as it passes through human brains—specifically, how information transfer by cultural communication is funneled through our prior intuitions, until the end result resembles those intuitions no matter what the original input. He showed a great toy example where people were shown linear, nonlinear, and random relationships between points—and after several generations of information transfer, peoples’ perceptions of the points all converged to positive linear relationships.

(Another anecdote from that day—the MIT faculty used the occasion of Dr. Griffiths’s talks to distribute annual teaching awards to the assembled faculty and graduate students. I had had four of the seven graduate students who won teaching awards, and three of the four faculty members who were honored with awards. It goes to show how astoundingly lucky I’ve been in my classes. [Also, to honor Professor Fee an anonymous student review of his class—and the speaker got maybe three sentences into it before I realized that that was mine :)]).

After the talk I took the M2 bus to Harvard Medical School, because the Conway Lab is in the process of moving from HMS to MIT! Prof. Conway is still a professor at Wellesley, but he is moving his main lab, where his lab technicians and postdoc work, from Boston to Cambridge. As I was getting on the bus I happened to run into Mela, who is the lab’s postdoc and I haven’t seen in a while. We got to chatting about Cambridge, and it turns out that she knows Dr. Zoe Kourtzi, who I’ll be working with in Cambridge next year! Mela is also returning to Belgium this summer, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to visit her when I do some traveling next year :).

When I arrived at HMS, I learned that there was a talk going on tomorrow by the Born lab, summarizing the CoSyNe conference that I attended last week in Utah. I had actually known about it before, but talking with people at HMS gave me the confidence and motivation to come :). You know how it is—sometimes it can be intimidating to just show up and be there, but encouragement can come from anywhere. So on Friday morning I woke up early, took the 7am bus into Boston, and arrived at HMS to hear Dr. Born talk about the conference. Unfortunately, only him and I had attended the conference, and he made me say a few words about my favorite speaker—which I hadn’t prepared for! It was crazy seeing all of those post-doc and graduate student eyes turn to me, as I fumbled out a quick description of an optogenetics study. I didn’t do a great job (I must prepare myself next time!) but Till, who is a post-doc who I’ve hung around over the past few summers, still gave me a thumbs-up in the end. And one of the female graduate students from another lab came and talked with me after. I appreciate so much that Dr. Born was pushing me—I demurred when he first asked me to contribute, but he just kept asking me until I pulled up my computer and tried to recall a single lecture as best as I could (with the assistance of the all-mighty internet.) It’s always been a mark in our lab if you can contribute a useful scientific comment to HMS Journal Club, because we’re less far along in the academic career path. (By the way, I have never used the word “undergraduate” so frequently in my life—it has now usurped the word “college” in my vocabulary, and I’m still an undergraduate/in college :P). But I have no contributed for the first time, because Dr. Born was forceful and looking out for me :).

In other happy news, Gabby just received all six of the offers she applied for! She will be deferring the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship, and will be accepting the Wellesley-Yenching Program—which means she’ll be in Nanjing, China teaching English next year! We’re all so excited for her :).

As a final note, I finally got into a College at the University of Cambridge next year! This is so humorous to me, but I managed to be randomly placed in one of the three all-womens’ dorms in England. And this dorm is also restricted to women at or above age 21—which I just qualify for :). Lucy Cavendish College looks beautiful, and I have no doubt I’ll meet all sorts of interesting women!

All right, readers, I’m going to sign off now—we have a big day of hiking ahead!

Monica