About Menicole-jardine@uiowa.edu My name is Nicole. When I was a kid I wanted to know lots of stuff about animals. One of my mom's favorite stories to tell about the six-year-old me is how I spent an hour cross-examining her one day trying to determine how parrots talk. I liked animals, and so did my best friend, and by the age of 12 I figured I ought to pursue a career in animal training. I did this for many fun years. Well, I consider it fun; not everyone enjoys raking up goat poo so that you can earn your time to hang out with the lions. Then came the second quarter of my first year in college. I was hanging out in my Perception professor's office hours, asking questions about visual sub-cortical neurons a few weeks before the pre-exam rush. I forget how we got on to this topic, but he asked what math I'd taken. “I've taken a semester of Statistics and Calculus each, and... well, I guess I was decent at it, I tended to set the curve.” He squinted and peered at me through his glasses in a way that only well-established professors can do. “And what do you want to do with your life?” I preened. “I want to train marine mammals!”
Empty silence. Three seconds passed in which he drew a breath, released it. Then: “That would be such a waste.” No one had ever said anything like that to me before. My first internal reaction was to be indignant.... but then I thought about it. Regardless of his opinion of such an illustrious career, it certainly couldn't hurt to try new things. That's what one is meant to do in college, right? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I was goaded into looking at on-campus research opportunities in Cognitive Science. Oh. That photo of me. I've always liked martial arts but clearly had not learned any at the time of that picture. (Since then I've studied Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga. I also have better hair.)
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