Team

How I got into science

I wouldn’t say that I am into science, but rather I am still getting acquainted with science. The words “I hate science” have left my mouth more often than not, and I was most definitely not the model AP Biology student. For a while, I believed that you had to be a certain type of person to study science and to excel in the field. I was never deemed a “science or math” person in high school, and because I struggled with these types of classes, I thought that maybe I couldn’t or shouldn’t study in the field.

I took my first Psychology course during my junior year of high school and, as the story usually goes, I fell in love with the study of the brain. While I absolutely love Psychology, the ambiguity behind so many fundamental theories makes me itch. I found myself wanting to know the “how’s” rather than the “why’s” that constitute human action. I thought that I could find all of these answers without having to try and comprehend the vast scientific detail behind the mechanics of the brain. It was not until I was standing in my shoebox of a dorm room, scribbling my own version of a paper’s figures on a two by one-foot whiteboard, and trying to give a TED talk to my roommates that I realized that science isn’t all that bad. As it turns out, deciphering the intricate, multi-layered, and very confusing neuroscience of the brain is kind of cool.

I sought out research as a different way to explore the brain. I’d like to think I was brainwashed, but after a couple of weeks in, I loved science? Here were the answers to all of my late-night Google searches and the means to begin to answer what Google had failed to.

I am still getting comfortable with being uncomfortable- with asking the wrong questions, questions with no answer, or questions with the simplest of answers, but I am thankful to have discovered research so early on, and I am so excited for what’s to come.