(no subject)
Wow. Today has been an AWESOME day. It's been a pretty good week acually, but today especialyl was great. This morning I had my meeting with Matt, my MCB 165 GSI. He's the one doing the drug research that I, ever since having David Presti's Brain, Mind, and Behavior class freshman year, have wanted to do. I was right in assessing that I HAD to talk to him. I met with him at Yali's Cafe and told him how excited I was to discover him since he is doing exactly the kind of shit that I want to do, and how I wanted to take the opportunity to pick his brain. I asked him about graduate programs and he told me that he didn't know much about psychopharmacology programs at other schools because he only really looked at Berkeley since he was already in the Bay Area and that even here he's pretty much carving out his own path, which doesn't surprise me. He told me something that I had kind of already intuitively internalized, that most people in the field of psychopharmacology do so from an addiction-treatment perspective, as an M.D., rather than as post-doc research. (This was exactly the reason that it was so special that I managed to have him fall into my lap, so to speak.) I asked him about his research and he told me, in GREAT detail, about his various grants. For one he give people MDMA (ecstacy) tries to quantify the various psychological effects. For another, future, grant, he wants to give people LSD and investigate the various visual and synesthesic (sp?) effects. As he was giving me the neurological details of all this, I was getting chills. Some of it was a little difficult to follow (because I need to bone up on my material from MCB 160), but the stuff that I was able to grasp was absolutely fascinating. I was finally getting really, really excited about my future, rather than worried and apprehensive. In fact, admittedly, the reason that it took me so long to contact him for a meeting was the fear that somehow I wasn't good enough. It was almost better for me to just keep that hope alive that he really could guide me by not persuing it than following through on it and finding yet another dead end. But to be so excited by the possibilites again...it finally reminded me that, because of my enthusiasm, I do belong here, I can succeed because I WANT to. By the end of our discussion (which was pretty much him going on and on and on and me sitting contentedly, listening and trying to understand) he all but offered me an internship with him. I think the only thing that kept him from offering it to me straight up was the "ethics" of it (which I took to mean the fact that I'm his student). But, depending on how I do in this class, there seems to be a pretty good chance that I have an internsip for the summer!!! His description of it pretty much sounds like unpaid bitch work (data input, separating urine samples, etc.), but it's a foot in the door and it will put me in contact with a lot of potentially influential people in my field. That alone is exciting and worth it all.