Allow Me to Introduce Myself...

To be perfectly honest, this isn't really my thing. I haven't delved into the personal-experience genre of blogging. Generally I write about trivia, sports, television and hamburgers on my own blog, along with essays and short stories both on my blog and on my ePortfolio (more on that later). But I'm here, so here goes...

...My name is Daniel Pecoraro, and I'm a member of the Class of 2014 at Hunter, meaning that this is my first full week in a college setting. So it just goes to show that my neophyte-ery is pretty high compared to many of the seasoned writers on this blogging establishment.

But in spite of the neophyte-ery, I'll press on. To put it plainly, so far, I'm loving my time at Hunter and at Macaulay. A brief rundown on why: I can actually accept stepping out of my comfort zone (taking a huge risk in the process, according to the venerable Onion), through stuff like Outward Bound day and my Arts in New York class (where we painted - seriously, we used watercolors to create portraits of our classmates, something I hadn't done since freshman year of high school), the classes are fun and challenging (where I get to learn from the fellow students, along with my professors - but that's another post), and we get Macbook Pros, which is what I'm writing my post on now.

I love history, which is something I'd like to continue studying in college (though my major is as of yet undecided), but I want to jump into other subjects - possibly media studies, possibly film, possibly even astronomy (which I've always held a recreational interest in). But my biggest goal for college is not focusing on history and only history (in fact, the exact opposite - see "stepping out of comfort zone" comment above), or keeping up a 4.0 (though we do have to maintain a 3.5 GPA), but take in all the City has to offer. Much like my partner-in-crime Danielle, I lived in a suburban area (specifically, southeast Queens, as far away from the City while still actually being in the City as is humanly possible), so from the dorms to the Cultural Passport to the New York seminars, I'm just taking in all the City has to offer.

I've got a few posts planned for the future, so stick around - and check out my personal blog!

Keepin' it fresh

Hi, I'm Danielle Gold and I'm a freshman at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College. I also like to state the obvious. And I would like to do so to a larger audience....so I moved from Long Island to the big city and volunteered to do Mac Blog and here goes nothing.

Not that I came here to blog. I plan on hitting the books hard and studying something related to the humanities. (I particularly like English, writing, history, and media.). I also want to eat and visit and learn about my surroundings. You'll know if I commit to something specific and if I see something exciting. By if, I mean when. Because if this past week (my first here) serves as precedent, something is bound to happen, even on a all girls 24-hour-quiet floor! I can't wait!

Fun at lab

This Monday I started working in a neuroscience lab at the NYU Medical Center, which has been great so far. I've been bouncing around from one lab to another for the past year or so looking for somewhere to settle down for good, so to speak, and this one definitely seems to be it. Not only are the facilities great and the work interesting, but the people are amazingly nice. And I'm the only undergraduate there which is always a good thing.

The lab is studying how the brain handles the intricate timing required for song production in finches. I know that sounds a bit abstracted from real life, and yes we scientists definitely stand the risk of spending out lives studying things no one else really cares about, but this actually has some implications. For one thing, we're studying songbirds because they are among the tiny percentage of animals that learn their vocalizations from others, in this case their fathers - and we humans are also in that minority. Speech production continues to be rather mysterious, so this research will eventually have therapeutic

possibilities as well as satisfying our curiosity.

More interesting, in my opinion, is that fact for all neuroscience has done, we still don't really get how the brain perceives time. It's one of those really simple things, seemingly, that is rather miraculous when you start to look at it closely. My long term interest is, roughly, in cognitive neuroscience, in other words taking philosophical and psychological questions about how the mind functions and looking at them from a biological perspective, so this lab is definitely feeding my habit. The final really great thing about it, of course, is all the cool science! If anyone thinking about coming to MHC Hunter is into science, I definitely recommend getting yourself into a lab once you've got a semester or two under your belt (just because it's a lot of work to take on right away). I've worked in a lab here at Hunter, and a couple elsewhere, and the experience is great and really satisfying.