Payday! (aka the halfway mark)

Just got half of my stipend today--and this marks the halfway point of the program. When we were all introducing ourselves on the first day, a lot of people, especially the older students, noted that this summer is helping them decide if research is a suitable career path for them.

Coming in, I was thinking about an MD/PhD program after college, so that I could combine clinical work with research. I did an internship at a drug company before freshman year of college, and while I was there, the physician-scientists I worked with felt that having both degrees was really beneficial: a medical degree helps with working with patients, while a doctoral program hones the critical thinking skills crucial for research.

But during these five weeks, I've already felt myself moving away from doing research as a major part of my career, and possibly toward public health. It's not that I'm not enjoying myself; I really do like the work that I'm doing. Also, since I'm in a psych lab, I see subjects regularly (I ran my first one last week, and will have two tomorrow), so it's not like I'm stuck in at a bench pipetting chemicals all day with minimal human contact.

This may just be my naivete and lack of experience, but as I was discussing with one of my roommates, I feel like my skills are better suited for applying scientific information and regularly working with patients and their families as a physician, rather than actually going in and doing the research itself. And I don't doubt that research helps people, but from all of my experiences so far, I find that having direct contact with the people I help is more gratifying. However, getting experience with designing and running studies is definitely worthwhile for any doctor, to help with understanding the vast amounts of literature out there. And I don't view this summer as a make-or-break experience, because what I'm doing now is just one out of many types of research.

On a related note, last week, during our weekly "all BRAIN" meeting, we had a video conference with Dr. Thomas Carew. He's the former president of the Society for Neuroscience, and he worked with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel on aplysia, a large sea slug. Their work contributed a huge amount to what we now know about memory and learning. He was wonderfully down-to-earth and very funny, and we had the opportunity to ask him questions, both about his papers we read during orientation and becoming a scientist. I read off a question my roommate wrote, asking him what the most important quality in an aspiring scientist is. His answer: unbridled curiosity, which fuels the passion and drive to go into the lab whenever necessary, even on Friday nights and weekends, until the question is solved. "You've got to really want it," in his words.

Off to go enjoy some of the dinner I helped prepare--we've fallen into a trend of having one person cook each Wednesday, and everyone who wants to come chips in to help cover the cost. So far we've had spaghetti and Japanese curry; tonight it's jerk chicken :)

The little things

It's cliche, but the little things do sometimes make a huge difference in your outlook. Today was a pretty average day at the lab, just some reading and programming, but it was a fantastic MARTA day.

MARTA's the public transit system here in Atlanta, and I didn't hear too many great things about it upon arriving here. But since neither my lab at Georgia Tech nor Emory have a train station nearby, and I couldn't bring a car down, I spend at least an hour and fifteen minutes on MARTA each way, transferring twice, from bus to train to bus. A couple days ago, it took me two hours to get back. Two! Google maps says it should only take 20 minutes to drive. But coming back from work today, I barely had to wait at all, even for the light to cross the street :)

Lesson learned: try to scope out the transportation situation in whatever place you're going to be interning in. Of course, it shouldn't play a huge role in deciding where to go, but it'll definitely help you make the most of your time.

Hello from the ATL!

Hey everyone! I'm a rising sophomore spending the summer in Atlanta conducting neuroscience research. I've been here for nearly 4 weeks now, so here's a summary of the program itself, and what I've been up to:

The Center for Behavioral Neuroscience has a program for undergrads called Behavioral Research Advancements in Neuroscience (which cleverly shortens to BRAIN), which I found through a Google search of "neuroscience summer program" or something of the sort back in January.

There are 36 of us, ranging from rising sophomores like me to recent graduates, and we're all staying in Emory University's dorms. During the day, though, we're in various labs in Atlanta area--a lot of people are at Emory or Georgia State; I'm the only one at Georgia Tech this year. We're also serving as subjects in an educational "experiment" to see if there's another (possibly better) way of getting undergrads involved in research, so we were randomly split into LeftBRAIN and RightBRAIN groups. I'm in RightBRAIN, so I'm going the traditional route, joining an established lab's on-going project, and I'll do a research report and presentation at the end of the summer. LeftBRAIN people are all together during the day, learning different research techniques and by the end of the program, they'll have a research proposal for a new experiment.

I arrived on May 26th and had a quick intro meeting and campus tour the day after. We also had entry interviews or focus group discussions to help the researchers understand our perspectives on science in general. We had the first weekend off in observance of Memorial Day, so a group of us decided to go explore the city. Then on Tuesday, we began orientation, a "crash course in neuroscience" to give everyone, especially those of us who don't have much of a neuroscience background, a foundation to begin our research work.

I began working in my lab the following Monday. My lab is more on the psychology/cognition end of the neuroscience spectrum, looking at memory in older and younger adults. In particular, I'm working with Eric, a postdoc, on a new study in young adults. We're using fMRI to see which parts of their brains are activated when they try to recognize words they've seen before. Two weeks in, I've finished the programming for the pilot experiment, and I'm also preparing to test older adults in a pilot for another study.

Check back for more updates as the summer progresses!

-From Hotlanta,


Jessica