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This experience has equaled a short lifetime, and so no short caption can personally accommodate it for me.
Years of conversation, questioning, and understanding. Our achievement signifies 4 years of our lives that amount to the good and bad change in us. The good:
I was overwhelmed my freshman year in cognitive psychology, actually buzzing out of my skin, when I encountered one of the first memorable lectures that openly touched on the jargon that I had studied nervously, amazedly, and privately for a great portion of my life. Phenomena and ideas that I had previously lacked any outlet for discussing were being said, like, out loud, and no one here knows or cares that I was not previously an ardent “academic.”
Seemingly simple words like Memory. Cognition. Attention. The concepts that live inside them don’t come for free. *wink*. These ideas are personal and integral to our very experiences of the world. Until approximately then, in the freshman classes, these words belonged to a private, fervent fascination I reserved gawkingly in my heart, defining my experience in many ways. I’d been very enamored by the mind in particular since I realized that I existed in one. Throughout my life, I have loved to explore myself and others minds through art. Every day after 5th grade, it’s time to google Vsauce brain, asap science brain, Dnow science brain, Crash Course brain.. Flipping to the back of the science books in 6th grade because literally when are we ever going to talk about the nervous system? I’m working at daycares, watching children’s minds dance on the paper when they say, Miss Zoé, look, I draw a “monster”. What even is a monster? Oh my god, this child conceptualized something and produced it back into the world. Incredible!
I’ve come to understand these words in novel ways. Even the most basic understanding in this field informs our understanding of perception, ourselves. To me, these ideas are the most priceless feature of our experiences.
I wasn’t sure what University really was for a long time. I had a different preference for learning. I listened to advice from a few loving people, who convinced me that I should consider it, that I’m a nerd and should go to a nerd place. I was unconventional: But its then-unfamiliar structure, deadlines, struggles, and ideas became where I chose to pursue my new, and was for some people in my life an unexpected, dedication - which was to entertain learning as an academic. The best choice I ever made for myself was giving this world and myself a chance, and opening up my shy, personal, gripping fascination and offering it back into the world. My admiration was not as hideable as I had thought!
This place offered me a surprising amount of avenues to make things happen. One of the most notable for me has been Neuroscience Club. I had never seen a brain before, but here I was planning, and then subsequently leading a dissection. A girl asks me, where do I suggest she looks next? I point to the cerebellum, planning for her to see the beautiful axon tracts. She follows the suggestion, her face lights up with a genuine shock, she gasps and there it is, that’s what I want to do for others in this life.
With all the struggles of academia, I can never neglect the particular fulfillment that it has opened the door to for me. My heart glows for the friends I’ve found in the sometimes quiet, humble, sincere parts of academia, where knowledge is pursued not for credentials, but because of the genuine human ardor to experience ourselves, each other, and the weird, beautiful world. It’s a privilege to explore so many corners of knowing and of not knowing. It continues to amount to more than I could’ve originally imagined. And I like imagining things.
For me, this has been a privilege that didn’t propel me in one single discipline, but that vaulted me into my understanding of the world.
I’m quite excited to continue my story of learning and teaching neuroscience and psychology as I start the next chapter: pursuing my Ph.D. in New York City!