(no subject)

So, having finally escaped Organic Chemistry and acquired some much-needed break time from classes, I'm ignoring the REU applications I really should be doing in favor of reading fandom commentary on pair, of, um, intelligence- and ethics-challenged "researchers" from back in September. Yes, I am a bit slow at catching on to these things; why do you ask? What strikes me about these SurveyFail guys is that they're making fundamental mistakes that I would know better to make, and I'm a second-year Psych major with exactly three Psych classes to my name, and one of those an AP class taken through the Internet. One of them was a basic research design course required for my major, and if I had presented this idea as a research proposal for my final project, I would have failed the course. I mean, when a sophomore undergraduate can laugh you out of town, perhaps you should rethink this whole psych thing, yes? And these people theoretically have their PhDs?

But reading all these well-thought critiques of these particular clowns is really crystallizing something quite different for me: I really, really love my chosen field. Not because it's the collection of Everything There Is To Know About Behavior, because truly it's not; psych is a baby science, all gangly and growing at every turn. It has its pseudosciences, it attracts its share of colossal asshats, and there's still that unfortunate association with Freud to deal with. (I nearly refused to major in Psych specifically because I have despised Freud since early adolescence and associated the field with him. Thankfully I was disabused of that particular misconception.) I still love it, though. More, if I'm going to be truthful, than my Genetics major.

The more I think about it, the more I feel like I'm going to choose Psych when it comes time to start trying to get into graduate school. Genetics, see--genetics is fascinating, but I could work on just about anything in genetics. Psych contains at least three things directly related to my experience of life that I could spend my entire life researching and barely make a dent in the amount of misinformation and plain ignorance that exists out there. That's not even counting the ways in which I could apply research in Psych to the dogs which form a pretty obsessive center of my world. I don't think it's a big coincidence that I came to psychology as an outgrowth of my interest in canine behavior; I find them terribly fascinating creatures and would like to properly study how they work. I could spend my life working on that, or on asexuality (though I seriously mistrust the funding for some research done on asexuality, particularly pharmeceuticals focusing on FSDD), or autism, or schizophrenia. Or I could work on neurochemistry, or how scent works, or how we process language, or on culture shock. All of those topics hit me and make me want to go find out more in a way that genetics research really doesn't. I think the problem with me and genetics is that my interest in that field largely also traces back to my interest in dogs. (I'm rather one-dimensional in this respect, to be frank.) And the primary interest I have in the topic that doesn't backcross immediately into behavioral tendencies again has to do with coat color and what genes can tell about historical migrations. The coat color interests I think are interesting but superficial and something you have enough researchers working on already, and in any case the mechanisms really don't grab me in the same way that behavioral mechanisms do.

I want to dabble in a baby field that is terribly understood. I want to be playing in the sandbox of my own grey matter; I want to be on the cutting edge. I want to find out more. I want to work in a field that is so widespread and has so much flexibility that pretty much anyone can hack out their own particular niche and work it. Not that other fields don't share that flexiblity, but it just seems so much wider in psychology. I want to know how minds work, how brains work, how behavior is shaped and formed and repeats itself. There's so very much we don't know, and I see that as a fantastic opportunity. Especially after starting my assistant work in Dr. C's lab, I've been leaning so much harder towards pursuing my career in this field, even if there's more private-sector limitations. (I don't know why the parental units keep harping on that; I don't want to do private sector work anyway.)

Eventually I'd like to be bothered to post semi-regularly here, if only for my own narcissistic pleasure. Unfortunately I have the attention span of a particularly small gnat and tend to do most of my thinking when I don't have access to a computer (e.g. when I'm trying to sleep), so I have no idea when I'll next get around to posting.