Working at the Sackler is becoming more and more enjoyable. I feel much more adjusted now and I think that our team is starting to feel a lot closer than we did in the beginning, so that is certainly a positive thing. We are all excited, nervous, and ready to deal with our child subjects.
Most of my day is spent working with children, teaching them about the brain and engaging them in brain-related games. The children we've worked with so far have really impressed me with their intelligence, curiosity, and energy. They spend quite some time in the experimentation rooms, so we try to make their break time (time in between experiments) as enriching and entertaining as possible. It's hard, sometimes, to strike a nice balance between education and fun, but I think we're getting it. It's definitely going to take some practice! Anyway, it's been exciting for me to be exposed to a new generation of smart, mature, and dedicated children.
I'm also about to start working on a project called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), which is a brain imaging technology that is similar to MRI in the way that it produces very accurate images of the brain that doctors and psychiatrists can analyze. We are trying to make correlations between areas in the brain called "white matter tracts" and mathematical and literary ability. We will be studying some data that has already been collected on groups of children in New York and California. The process of analysis, I think, will be particularly challenging, as one "brain scan" is made up of a 30 x 30 image which basically produces 900 "points of interest" that we need to analyze. But like most daunting tasks, practice makes perfect.
Aside from working with children and DTI, I am still gathering some data on my enumeration experiment. This is an exciting one because I have been administering this experiment on my own without any help/supervision. My independence here is something I really appreciate.
Sometimes I forget that the Sackler is a nonprofit organization, as it is comfortably housed in the renown Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. But lo and behold, the hard-working and dedicated staff really reflect the sheer determination and energy of the classic nonprofit. Everyone arrives early and works late, driven mostly, I think, by an intrinsic motivation to succeed and do well.
Today my supervisor made a really nice comment about me that made my day, and I think I'll leave off on that note. I asked her how I could help make her load a little easier, and she said that I have been helping her immensely and that I was the kind of person that she would only have to "tell something once to." Receiving this feedback is really nice; it rewards my efforts and makes me feel like I have done a good job.
Anyway, in my next blog I will try to write more comments about the seminars we have been having and the places we have been visiting. What I will say right now is that I am so grateful to those organizations like the Fortune Society that have seen an ill in society and are doggedly trying to fix it.
Until next time!
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