Reflection on Summer Fellowship Thus Far…

I am elated to have the opportunity to work with fantastic faculty members and peers each day. When I began this fellowship I was a bit unclear as to what exactly we would be doing for ten weeks. I had browsed the Serendip website and read blogs from past years to try to obtain a little more of a sense of what exactly I would be doing, but they too only seemed like a conglomeration of ideas and thoughts which at first glance appeared to be un-related. Therefore although I was excited to begin working I honestly had the slightest clue of what I would be doing.
After our first meeting though it became clear that I would be working in a way that I had never experienced before. Rather than having to abide by a day-to-day list of assignments my co-workers and I would be encouraged to take our thoughts and run wild. Of course we did have some general topics that were necessary to touch upon for the Summer Institute, but we were challenged to go at our own pace and continually explore phenomena of the brain that struck us as interesting. We would meet twice a week to discuss anything that we found particularly interesting and hold an open discussion on what we discovered and any ideas that we constructed from that. 
So, here we are now three weeks in ( and continuing with the same routine as above) and I must admit that I am more confused than I have ever been. This may sound as though it would have a negative connotation, but actually it’s quite the opposite. In the three short weeks of work so far I have realized that while I used to view confusion as such a negative state of being, perhaps it is actually an entirely positive state. Confusion is the realization that you do not know or understand a certain concept or concepts but at the same time you are striving for that sense of understanding. I have been introduced to ideas that possess serious implications for education such as multiple selves and the struggle between ‘right’ and ‘less wrong’ and I have also found that I can draw connections to so many of the ideas that used to appear as separate entities. It seems as though so many of the ideas that we have discussed so far (such as multiple selves, the Monty Hall Dilemma, and ‘less wrong’) are all actually intertwined ideas that create an enormous web around the brain with the brain acting as a nucleus. As we are beginning to discuss their relation to education it is again impossible not to connect the dots from idea to idea. Although it may sound a bit cliché I am honest in saying that I am now viewing the world in a completely different sense then I used to and I cannot wait to work with educators and share this experience.
Although I feel as though I now have a stronger grasp of what I am doing this summer I still feel as though it is difficult to relate this to others. This can be attributed to a couple of things, first of which I would say is the presence of a close-minded attitude of what many believe ‘science research’ is and what it entails. Today, for example, I was asked by another student who is a chemistry major what our research was focused on and after explaining a bit she asked if we had a certain set of procedures we followed and if we recorded our findings daily. Even after explaining that our research did not fulfill the conventional persona of science research it was still unclear to her exactly what we were doing. For the most part I try explaining to others what our goals of this research are and many times to help them visually conceive what we are doing I suggest they visit Serendip for themselves and browse the site.
Lastly, I still feel as though many of the other students that are here for summer research have mixed ideas and feelings of our research. While some people state that it’s awesome, others are still confused by it and fail to see the correlation between the research that we are doing and their own research. Again, they fail to see that many times you don’t need a definite result that you must reach at the end of the day. Because of this they don’t find our research as important or as accredited as their own and often discount what we are doing. However, I think that we are helping to re-define what exactly science is and research is alike.