Hi everyone! My junior year has recently come to an end, and I wanted to share my four favorite memories from this year with you on and off campus. It’s surreal to think I will be done with my degree next year. Let’s get into it!
1. Cafe hopping
I love coffee, so when I found out that a new cafe opened down the street from my apartment, I was super excited! The name of the cafe is called Blueprint Cafe, and they serve all kinds of drinks and delicious pastries. My go-to order is the Vietnamese coffee and the pistachio milk toast. I would often go there in the early morning to get work done or go with my friends as more of a fun outing. So good!
2. Petting cats
This year, I joined a new lab, which is the LIU lab on the Homewood campus. My research hopes to understand the neural basis of social and physical reasoning. The lab manager, Sam, recently got a cat, and he has brought his cat into lab multiple times. It was nice to have the cat exploring the lab space and jumping onto my lap while I was doing my work.
3. Building gingerbread houses
This year, my friends and I went to the Lighting of the Quads event at the end of the fall semester. We got a ton of free stuff, including free shirts, mugs, and snacks. One of the activities in the Lighting of the Quads event was building gingerbread houses and making snow globes in Levering Lounge. My friends and I loved building our gingerbread house, and we enjoyed putting our own artistic flare on it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t edible, but at least it looked pretty!
4. Taking even more interesting classes
This year, I got to dive deeper into more of my major specific classes. I took three interesting upper levels this year: Prefrontal Cortex: Neurophysiology and Computational Modeling, Neuroscience of Decision Making, and Human Neuroplasticity. These classes were seminar-style, discussion-based classes. Through these classes, I learned about current neuroscience research in these particular fields. These classes all count for my focus area (cognitive neuroscience), so it was cool to see the overlap of certain concepts I learned in all three classes.
