Week 1: Introduction
Hello!
My name is Hope Peterson, and I am a rising senior from Asheville, NC. I am a psychology major with minors in neuroscience, biology, and theatre; I am also a member of the first class of students enrolled in a 5-year neuroscience dual-degree master’s program. I am so excited for the summer and for the opportunity to blog about my progress over the next eight weeks.
My internship this summer is through the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD. I am working in a lab that is tracking the natural progression of traumatic brain injuries using psychological measures and cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques. This is the kind of research I hope to eventually dedicate a career to, and it is more specialized that the research I am currently involved with at Wake Forest; I am incredibly excited to begin, and experience this high level of academic research. I do not know what my roll in the lab will look like yet: I may be involved in patient contact and data collection (of psychological measures or neuroimaging), or data analysis, or I may simply be calling to recruit patients and greet them as they arrive at the lab. Hopefully, by them time I’m writing another blog entry, I’ll know more.
As a part of this internship, I will also be attending different types of courses offered for students by the NIH. Some are being offered to all summer interns, and some are offered by the clinical center and I am attending just because I work in my specific lab. I am most excited for a course about functional MRI (fMRI) scans on humans and animals, how they differ from other imaging techniques, how to read them, and much more. One of my major goals for the summer is to learn to read MRI scans. I hope to work with neuroimaging as I continue towards my career, and this is a phenomenal opportunity to learn to run and read these scans at an early point in my education. If I have a choice in selecting what I do in the lab, I hope to run scans, and help read them.
I am fascinated by the idea of consciousness. I was originally drawn to the field of neuroscience because I worked with children with special needs, and I was immensely curious about why and how their perception of the world was different from my own. The more I learn about the human brain, the more I realize is unknown and may always remain so. But for me, the biggest question is how do we get from electrical and chemical signals traveling the length of a neural cell and communicating with the next neuron in line all through the brain to thought, emotion, memory? Why and how are humans conscious beings? What makes us unique as a species, and as individuals? I hope to study whole brain functioning and communication as a means to examine consciousness, and I hope that this internship and the skills that I gain by learning more about fMRI and other research techniques will set me more concretely on the path of being able to research these questions.
Tomorrow, I travel to Bethesda, and Friday I become acquainted with the NIH. I begin my internship orientation on Monday the 13th, and I’m both nervous and excited. I’ve never spent this long in a big city, and I’m nervous-excited to explore and find new places and new people for the summer. The NIH is somewhere I might be able to see myself working after continuing my education, and this seems like as good a way as any to dip my toes in the water. So, wish me luck as I embark on this little summer adventure, and grow as a student, a researcher, and a person!
