Two more weeks until school starts...

Hello world!

My, it's been quite a long time since I've posted something here. Well, I returned home from the CSHL Undergraduate Research Program last weekend! It was a pretty good experience. =)

More news will come eventually...

I got in somewhere!

I've been accepted into the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Undergraduate Research Program this summer! Hooray! I have accepted and have preliminary details about what I would be working on - studying learning and memory in drosophila and altering code/hardware for the flight simulator to better track drosophila flight patterns or something like that. It sounds pretty interesting and does indeed combine parts of neuroscience (including memory!) with parts of computer science pretty interestingly. Hopefully, it will all work out nicely.

If you're interested, here is the lab page explaining the research.

And for my reference, related links:
A drosophila flight simulator, with video
Recent related paper by future mentors: Analysis of the Trajectory of Drosophila melanogaster in a Circular Open Field Arena
PLoS comment section for above paper - contains link to discussion questions
A list of some papers by my future higher-up mentor, Dr. Partha Mitra
Drosophila melanogaster - Wikipedia
Related to first link; Simulating neuronal nets with SNNAP

Summer Programs

Ugh. I'm applying to a bunch of research programs this summer, mostly in neuroscience, with one in computer science / math. I have a list of seven programs so far and it sometimes feels like a lot (even though I cut it down from ten), but I'd really like to get into one, and more applications means a higher chance of getting in somewhere.

I don't mind applying to more programs. Their applications are pretty much the same. But it's the faculty recommendations that are giving me a hard time. My two recommenders are my research mentor and my computer science program director who was my boss when I was a CA for one of her classes. I don't want to ask for too much since they are both busy with the beginning of the semester. I have already sent the lists to them and my CS director replied, saying it was a pretty daunting list for this time of the year. (My research mentor hasn't replied for a few days now.) So I feel like I should really cut it down, namely on the ones that require more than a general letter of recommendation, but these programs - MIT's UROP and Univ. of Minn.'s Program in Cognitive Sciences - look pretty promising, with MIT offering many many more possible mentors that I might enjoy working with (memory, plasticity, computational/theoretical neuroscience). So, to drop or not to drop the Univ. of Minn. program... My girlfriend applied to four REU's and thought that was a lot. I'm doing seven (although one requires no rec's and has a deadline after all the others will have decided if I got in). *sigh*

Ok, I will drop it. Make life easier for my recommenders. I don't want them getting tired of writing rec's for me...

Thanks, blog! Writing my thoughts out helps. =)