Your job and/or schooling

( The list )

It's all about the brains for me. Has been since I was 13, when I decided I was destined for a career in experimental psychology.

Before then, my education was all over the place. I was homeschooled for most of it, then attended private school for almost a year--they kicked me out before I could finish fifth grade because I attempted to hold the teacher to the same standards of respect to which she held us. I did an independent study program for a while before diving headfirst into community college at eleven. The C I got in Nutrition class that first semester still haunts my transcript.

But then I found out I could learn how minds worked for a living, and I've never looked back. It wasn't immediately obvious what other people called the field I wanted to enter, but I've known for more than seven years now what I want to do. I started out saying I wanted to study "you know, stuff like stereotypes and prejudice and how people make assumptions." Then I discovered the term "heuristics" in my first semester at Clark, and latched onto that as a catch-all description. Then I started reading Kahneman and Tversky, and Gigerenzer, and Damasio, and "Blink," and Jonah Lehrer's blog, and it turns out that there isn't one single name for what I want to study. I call it "judgment and decision-making" or "decision science" now, because the more technically accurate "hedonics" tends to bring sex to mind. It's preference, liking, why we gravitate toward some things and away from others.

For a long time, that's what my schooling has been about. The work I'm doing with Dr. K on modulation of the sweet taste receptor is paying my bills right now, and it's interesting enough, but I'm doing it because it will look good on a resume when I apply to do the stuff I really want to do.

Something that upsets you

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The thing that probably upsets me most is my own incompetence. Like most academics, I suffer from imposter syndrome; I feel like I'm not good enough, like I've gotten through life thus far through luck rather than any intrinsic capability.

Of things to be upset about, I think it's a fairly productive one. I'd rather get mad at myself for not being able to do something and then hound myself about it until I figure it out than get mad at myself for, say, not being pretty enough. I'm never really satisfied with anything I do, and I think that's probably led me to a lot of my successes.

Although, of course, most of those successes have come from luck.