Harvard Research Experiences

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences REU @ Harvard

During the summer of 2016, I decided to venture out to the great east coast. Being a west coast girl my whole life, this was a pretty big step for me, not to mention I was going to be doing research at a pretty renowned school- I had a lot of thoughts about that actually. I seem to recall having a dream one night while I was still at home in safe Central Valley of California that I was in some research lab at Harvard and had no idea what I was doing. I was pretty stressed out in that dream- trying to talk to someone about something I knew nothing about it seemed. Occasionally I have moments like these as I believe we all do. Eventually the time came for me to make the flight out and journey to the land of nothing but red brick buildings and T stops. I won’t lie, I really didn’t enjoy Cambridge the first few weeks. I felt very out of place and sweaty all the time – Boston gets very humid in the summer! However, once the REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) program began, I started to feel more structure in what I was doing and more confident in my abilities to do research.

My actual research project took a while to develop in terms of finding out exactly what I wanted to work on during the summer. At first, I thought I would go down the path of bees and discover more about bee cognition. I was very interested in the hierarchy of their system and how individual bees actually act quite similar to that of neurons – my cognitive science flare coming out. I was and am still very interested in how bees behave as a unit; however, sometimes projects don’t work out for one reason or another or you find your skill set would be better used in another project. I ended up joining another project on human perception in relation to euclidean geometry. To sum up the research into a sentence or two, we wanted to discover whether or not the perception of euclidean geometry was innate to human beings or not. This helps decipher to a finer-grained extent the underlying mechanisms of our geometrical intuitions and could be used within education to help teach more effectively.

While research was one part of the summer, I found that perhaps the best part was meeting all the amazing people who were also in the program and being able to explore Cambridge alongside many of them. I made some life long friends during that summer and I believe I will be back to visit the great city of Boston someday in the future.