One day last summer, I rummaged through the drawers in my neuroscience lab, looking for supplies to build an artificial mouse head. As part of my undergraduate research at Johns Hopkins, I was building a rig to photograph blood vessels on a mouse’s brain, and I needed a model to test it on. After time spent tinkering with the cameras and lights to get them to point at exactly the right angle, I was eventually able to use the apparatus to collect data that will help us understand how the brain processes sensory information.
Upon reflection, it surprises me that I now spend my days this way because growing up, I never considered a career in science. I grew up in a small town in southern Virginia, and when I say small, I mean a population of less than 1500. There certainly were perks to growing up in such a tight-knit community: if my car broke down, chances are that within the next half hour, someone driving by would recognize me and come to my rescue. I never really had to make new friends, as the kids I started kindergarten with were the same ones who walked the stage with me to graduate high school. And I can not think of another environment where a valid excuse for being late to school was “there was a cow in the middle of the road, I had to wait for it to move.”
While there are various benefits to growing up in a small town, receiving an education in an isolated, rural area does present challenges. Consistent with the statistics on students from rural high schools who attend college, the majority of my friends and I did not have parents with a college degree, which limited the life trajectories we were exposed to. My mom always pushed me to go to college because she knew it would give me more opportunities than she had, but I was not really sure what that entailed. I knew that I found my science classes fascinating, and the outcomes of a science-based education I had seen in my community were to become a nurse or a science teacher. I assumed this was my trajectory, and I was happy with that. Only after I experienced a traumatic brain injury in my sophomore year of high school did I first question this assumption.
At this time, I would walk into the bathroom to wash my hands and forget why I was there. What could be dismissed as an insignificant memory slip became more concerning when it manifested in everyday activities, such as getting the supplies out to make a sandwich and not knowing where to start. My doctors told me that my cognitive function had been impaired and that why these injuries impact patients differently is not well understood. I became intrigued by the fact that the brain, so essential to our existence, could present such a mystery. Even more fascinating was its ability to recover, as mine did. Because I could not attend school for several months, I used the abundance of free time to explore the neurology volumes of my grandmother’s old nursing textbooks. After showing her my cat’s pupillary constriction reflex by shining a light in his eye, not without his protesting, she asked me if I had considered a career in medicine. I thought about my neurologist, a strong, intelligent woman whose job allowed her to think about and study the same topics that interested me. I decided then that this would be my path and chose Johns Hopkins for its strength in this area (which honestly, I learned about from Grey's Anatomy).
I was ecstatic to jump into my pre-med education at Hopkins, but I quickly realized that I would first need to adjust to living in a place much larger and more diverse than Victoria, Virginia. I went from an environment with little opportunity for growth and development, to a world with so much that it was intimidating. While people in my dorm discussed research opportunities, I was happy if I could make it through chemistry lab without breaking something. Eventually, I adjusted. I finally learned to cross the busy streets without dying, and I learned how to live on a much smaller budget than my friends from more fortunate backgrounds were afforded. Once I was able to balance all these new changes with the rigorous coursework, I decided to revisit my interest that brought me to Hopkins: the brain.
My sophomore year, in one of my neuroscience classes, a vascular neurologist gave a talk where she discussed her research in stroke recovery. Given my interests, I excitedly spoke with her after the talk and soon joined her clinical research lab at the medical school. In the clinic, I observed the functional outcomes of damage to entire brain regions, but I was curious about the individual circuits that were affected within each of these areas. I began to realize that the questions I had about the brain could not be answered in a clinical setting; I was intrigued by the brain on a more molecular level. After talking through my interests with a professor, he helped me find a neuroscience lab where I spent the following summer studying how the brain processes sensory information. The first time I looked under the microscope to see the connectivity patterns of neurons, I knew that I wanted to pursue neuroscience research as a career, so I remained in this lab for the remainder of my time at Hopkins. I worked to elucidate the diversity of a population of cells involved in the perception of sensory information, and I was able to present my work at a few conferences, including the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago.
My undergraduate work in this lab confirmed that I want to one day run my own neuroscience research laboratory. After weighing the options of what step to take next in my academic career, I spent the fall of my senior year at Hopkins applying to PhD programs and researching neuroscientists whose work interested me. Throughout my coursework as a neuroscience major, I became interested in neural development: basically how the brain grows up. I realized that I wanted to combine my previous work on neural circuits with my interest in development, so I applied to programs that allowed me to do so. Ultimately, I ended up choosing the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, where I will begin my work in August 2020.
This was an interesting year to graduate (see below for my virtual graduation), but nonetheless, I am incredibly thankful for the opportunities that I have been granted as a college student. Going to Harvard for my PhD not only gives me incredible scientific opportunity, but it also gives me the immense privilege of helping shape the field of neuroscience to be more inclusive and accessible to all. I look forward to using my experiences as a first-generation college student to increase scientific outreach to vulnerable communities. The greatest scientific minds come from an immense variety of backgrounds, so alongside my scientific career, I will work to increase diversity in science.
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