I have never been a morning person. I generally don’t schedule classes before 10am during the year, because I know that I have a difficult time getting myself to pay attention to anything in the mornings. That being said, I had no trouble throughout this program being attentive during the morning seminars because they were such a wonderful resource that I didn’t want to miss out on any of them. Hearing professional researchers speak about the paths that they took to get to their current positions was both inspiring and reassuring because many of them either had no idea what career they wanted to pursue when they started college or they quickly changed their minds after discovering science. At a university like Duke, it is often disheartening to be undecided about your major, simply because so many students around me already seem to know exactly what they want to do in life. Obviously, they might (and probably will) change their minds at some point, but I still often find myself wishing that I were in their shoes. Therefore, hearing so many successful researchers talk about how they were in my exact position in college was extremely encouraging to hear.
In addition, these seminars were a wonderful opportunity to hear about the incredible research being conducted at Duke and about how to get involved with that research as an undergraduate. One of my favorite seminars was the talk given by Dr. Susan Alberts, who happens to work down the hall from the Patek lab. I had been introduced to Dr. Alberts on my first day in the Patek lab and had spoken to her multiple times, but it wasn’t until her seminar that I really got an idea of the research that she is working on. I have always had an interest in behavioral biology, so it was very interesting to hear about her work studying the behavior of baboons in Kenya and the field work that her team conducts sounds like such an incredible and immersive experience. I also took an Intro to Evolutionary Anthropology class last semester, so I enjoyed being able to apply the concepts I had learned in that course to Dr. Alberts’s seminar.
