Final grades were announced for the second semester, the research term, confirming that I passed my Master's defense on Monday and finished my degree. In fact, I finished my degree with a mention of "Très Bien" which is the French equivalent of an A average!
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| Having worn stilettos to my Master's defense, I found myself biking home in high heels after my yoga class later that night. (Paris has an awesome city-sponsored public bike rental system which is often more efficient than travel by metro.) This bike ride somehow felt like a milestone since I am always watching Parisian women biking around Paris in shoes in which I'd struggle to walk. The angle of the photo doesn't do the shoes justice: they're a solid 3 to 4" high. |
Very pleased to be past one hurdle, as soon as I finished my Master's defense the day before yesterday I began trying to become a PhD student. As usual, the process was far more complex than I could foresee. Arriving in the doctoral contract office equipped with all the documenst requested, I soon learned that their computers believed I didn't exist despite my previous online doctoral school application I'd completed last week. It turns out that besides my funding school-- the Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris, my research institute-- the Pasteur, and the school which holds my contract-- the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC), I still have an extra Institute of Doctoral Training and a Brain and Cognition Doctoral School within the UPMC which all require at least one large application file, in some cases several. No one office is capable of explaining the full picture to a confused new foreign student, but simply sends the student on to the next office which insists the student should not be there, sifts through many files, and after some head shaking and shoulder shrugging, sends the student off to yet another office in the chain.
My student visa expires tomorrow and with it my right to live in the country. Sadly, despite all my applications and mad running around the city, I am not yet a fully enrolled student for the upcoming school year, which complicates the picture for visa (or more accurately, "carte de séjour") renewal.
Assuming I can renew my carte de séjour and stay in the country, I only have to deal with
1. finishing my summer research project
2. continuing the hunt for my French social security card which was officially "lost in the mail"
3. trying to figure out how to convince my landlord that a staircase which collapsed under the weight of a human normally descending the staircase does not fall under "misuse of staircase" but rather "poor construction"... and then figuring out how to get the staircase replaced
4. no longer being on good (or talking) terms with my housemates after a broken tile incident due to a glass bottle poorly placed in the fridge falling when I opened the door, and a second version of just how this happened
On the upside, in the process of preparing one of my doctoral school applications I found myself required to write a letter of motivation which actually served pretty well to get me excited about the reason I have the right to live here: science. To give you the highlights of this letter, here are the key excerpts without much dense science terminology:
The greatest frontier yet to explore is the mind. The discoveries that we make in neuroscience will provide us with a deeper understanding of how every person on the planet thinks, reasons, and functions. Leapes in technological development have finally made it possible to begin investigating questions which until recently seemed unanswerable. We can observe and even control brain activity on multiple levels, from that of a single synapse to a full systems-level perspective. Today's neuroscientists are turning the dreams of generations of fiction writers into reality.
The interface between neuroscience and technology captivates me. It integrates the daily technical design challenges which motivate me as an engineer and the satisfaction in knowing that I am taking part in the search to truly understand the biological basis of intelligence, the most fundamental feature which sets out species apart. For my doctoral thesis, I will construct a stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscope which can achieve resolution down to the tens of nanometers, not only breaking the diffraction barrier but resolving well under the wavelength of the light used to produce the image. I will investigate the localization and dynamics of neurotransmitter receptors in synapses of living neurons, a topic which could not have been investigated in living cells a decade earlier. I am excited to continue my work with new optical techniques and apply them to probe the intricate workings of the synapse, the basic unit of information transfer in the brain.
After concluding my studies, I hope to become faculty at a major research university. I hope that I will lead a team focused on understanding the neuron both as a computational unit and within a circuit, with the goal of better understanding biological computation. I would like to see my team contribute to alternative or improved methods for artificial computation solidly based on biological intelligence if not using biological parts themselves as the building blocks for new artifical computation systems. Leading a team of researchers and teaching courses both interest me. I would like to work on the forefront of scientific and technological research while inspiring the next generation of scientific minds.
Voilà! The forced motivational letter writing was at least one benefit I've gotten out of all this administrative nonsense. It's nice to have to take a step back and think about why you're toiling away over all the nitty-gritty scientific details of daily research and how they fit into a pretty awesome big picture.
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