The Beginning - One Last Time
I suppose some introductions are in order. My name is Febronia Mansour. As you likely read on my About page, I will be a senior this coming September at Guilderland High School and this year is my last of three in our school's independent inquiry program, Exploring with Mindful Creativity and Curiosity.
This is the beginning... a final beginning. But this journey that we are embarking on together probably won't have an end. If I've learned anything through all of my academic adventures, it's that a quest to learn and to understand only ends when one decides. As far as I know, we haven't reached the end of all there is to study in the brain so until then, I'll be here, trekking away at perhaps the most amazing organ in the human body.
Sometimes, I stop for a moment and consider the fact that twelve months from now, I will no longer be in high school and more importantly, I will no longer be in this class. It feels strange - I'm not sure I will ever be ready to leave behind the most meaningful thing that's happened to me in my high school career. But I consider these experiences, no matter how captivated and attached they may cause me to become, as things that are providing me with tools for the future.
That probably makes you ask the question of what exactly it is I will be doing over the next ten months and that is on its most raw level, learning. About the brain, about people, about how to be better. Because that's what we do here. I believe there comes a point when someone goes from simply being curious about something to beholding a larger purpose - to improve because of that self-encompassing, time-consuming thing. For me, that started out as the broad topic of biology, but it eventually became about the brain. About understanding what it is that makes us so special, so talented, and most of all, so complicated.
If you haven't yet taken some time to look at my work from last year, I strongly recommend that you do so. But meanwhile, I will tell you this; what started out as a scholarly journey in September, eventually turned into a quest in June to understand the universe - how it works and why it works - through the lens of a three-pound mass. I won't explain all that happened because that is a story far too long to tell but building off of the process I endured last year, I hope to write a thesis paper about a specific component in the brain.
I'm not sure what process I will choose to tackle but I am leaning towards something about the Glymphatic System - an entity that excites me to no end but which cannot be solely discussed as a subtopic of this blog post.
Anyway, over the summer, I am an intern in the lab of Dr. Kenneth Norman at a local hospital, Albany Medical Center. Here, I am studying nematodes (specifically, C. Elegans) and what's very cool about these worms is that they only have 302 neurons but this small-scale nervous system very closely emulates that of humans. So they're basically a smaller model of the human nervous system and they're also transparent so with the correct tools, it is possible to see a single electrical impulse dart through each neuron in one of these microscopic worms (!).
This week is my first at the lab but I think I need some time to decompress and think about the things I am doing and learning before I can journal about that.
Going into this project though, there are certain things that I am apprehensive about. One of those things is increasing my collaboration with my classmates in E=MC2. The only people who can understand exactly why I love the brain as much as I do are the ones who are also studying something that they are inexplicably passionate about. So even though I haven't necessarily utilized these natural communications in the past, I hope to take full advantage of that this year because I think there is a world of worth in talking to others and seeing things from their perspectives.
One event that confirmed that to me was a workshop we did a couple days after last school year ended. Throughout the day, we jumped between miscellaneous topics, collaborated in small groups to answer random questions such as "Who was the greatest president?" and even tried our hands at debates on free will and minimum wage. Even though no part of that day was specific to anyone's topic of research, it was demonstrated to us the different perspectives and opinions which can be brought to the table when collaboration is utilized. I hope to emulate that throughout the year.
Like I said above, this is just the beginning. I have no doubt that there will be twists and turns, low points and high points, failures and successes. But amidst the unpredictable nature of such a learning experience, I hope that I can offer you some insight into how our brains work and why it's so important to understand such a system.