I've just finished - or mostly finished - studying for my Ethics midterm on Friday. The next two weeks are full of tests, including two next Monday that are just 40 minutes apart. Things are getting rather overwhelming. I don't even think I'm taking very hard classes, it just that taking 15 to 17 credits every semester gets tiring after a while. Plus I'm in my lab about 12 to 15 hours a week which means even more mental energy consumed, and even less time to study. But it's definitely worth it; I've come to enjoy being at lab far far more than being in class. For that matter I'm getting pretty tired of being in school in general... sigh.
This fall is also busy because I have some applications to prepare; I'm applying for three scholarships this fall. One is the Goldwater, a pretty prestigious science fellowship. Another is the NIH undergraduate scholarship, a program for disadvantaged (i.e. poor) science student; that one has less prestige but is a good deal, they give you money, training over the summer, and a job after graduation. Then I'm applying for another smaller program through Hunter, the BP-ENDURE program, a similar stipend and summer program specifically for neuroscience students.
This fall is also stressful because it involves a ton of thinking about the future, and not in a pleasant daydreamy way. I've been putting a lot of time and effort planning out my last 3 semesters, deciding when to take my GRE, figuring out when to apply to graduate school and starting to consider where I'm going to apply. My next step will be to pick the brain of the principle investigator at my lab and see what he has to say on the matter. At the moment the top contenders are NYU, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, MIT and Johns Hopkins... but I'm sure that list will get longer.
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