2023

It’s somewhat hard to believe that 2023 went by as quickly as it did. While this year did have lots of fun moments, there were also lots of moments when it felt like time was at a standstill and I just wished I could move on to the next moment. But thanks to both the highs and the lows of this year, I no longer find myself waiting for the end of the chapter to hit so the next one can begin.

Part of this has to do with my coming to terms with the fact that I will be in school until I’m at least 29- this year I began my 21st year of education, and I’m one of the last one in my immediate family and within my friends to be in school! If I keep wishing and waiting for the end of this chapter, I’m going to be 29 and will have missed out on every exciting moment that each turn of the page brings. So, towards the end of this year I’ve been trying to focus on taking things one day at a time. Looking back, it’s amazing to me just how much happened this year! Here are some of the highlights.

In May of this year, I finished the 2nd year of my PhD and also earned my 2nd Master’s degree.

May also brought the end of a year-long process of data collection. For many weekends in the summer of 2022 and almost every single weekend between September 2022 and May of 2023, I was at the Boston Museum of Science collecting data for 2 big research projects. One of these projects asks about how children’s judgements about others’ explanations about scientific topics, and the other project asked about how people’s feelings about science are shaped by social identity. You can read about both of these projects on my research page here. For the science and identity project, we also ran participants online for one of my undergraduate mentee’s honor’s thesis projects.

I was also a research assistant on our lab’s curriculum intervention project called the Evolving Minds project. This project focuses on teaching early elementary-aged students about the process of evolution by natural selection as a cause-and-effect process.

I used some of the data we gathered from Evolving Minds to apply for a fellowship through the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future for this summer. I wanted to learn more about how research from experimental psychology could be translated into policy. This fellowship was a really rewarding experience for me because we heard from researchers and professionals who approached policy from different perspectives.

I also got some focused time to begin creating a coding scheme for a qualitative data project using the Evolving Minds classroom data. This project involves examining classroom discussions for the kinds of questions that teachers and students asked while engaging in this curriculum about evolution. I won’t say too much more about this project here since it’s still underway, but hopefully I’ll be able to share more details next year!

In the Fall, thanks to the help of some amazing research assistants in our lab, my data for my project looking at how children respond to different kinds of explanations has been processed, and I was able to submit that project and my work on science identity to 2 different conferences- all of my submissions were accepted so I have 3 symposiums to look forward to presenting during this next year!

My major focuses for this next year are to finish my project looking at questions asked in the classroom using transcripts from the Evolving Minds project and to start writing the papers for these explanations and science and identity projects. In the last part of 2024, I’ll probably also start thinking about proposing my dissertation (!!).

This year has been the year of trying new things for me. When I was younger, I was always afraid of trying things that I thought I’d be bad at. One of the goals of my research, though, is to help create learning spaces where anyone and everyone feels like they can engage with science even if it’s not something they feel that comfortable with. You cannot learn if you are unwilling to try things after all, and if this is something that I want to help make happen for other people, shouldn’t I also do this in my own life?

This year I turned 26 and I went line dancing for my birthday- I was still bad at it, but it was a lot of fun!

I also went hiking in the fall with my roommate- something else I’m really bad at- but I’m still glad I did it. Look at these views of the fall leaves!

In the summer, I started embroidering my own clothes- I did these jeans and they turned out so much better than I thought they would! I also decorated these tote bags for some of my friends as gifts for the holidays. I’m not perfect at it yet, but I’m looking forward to getting better 🙂

My Etsy shop took a pause for this year because there was too much going on with life, but I’m looking forward to bringing it back next year!

In March/April of this year, I realized that I was doing the same thing every single week and it felt like life was passing by, but everything was staying stagnant. Just earlier during the year I’d been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum (it’s my go-to museum to take visiting friends) and they had a special exhibit with Isabella’s personal photos from her travels on display.

To an outside viewer, these photos didn’t seem like anything special- they were just photos of her on vacation. But many years after Isabella these handmade albums are looked at as art, and they illustrate parts of her story that would never be known unless she had taken the photo.

I don’t have Isabella Stewart Gardner money, but I’ve been realizing that there are other ways to be creative in capturing your story and the big and small moments of your life. My one-polaroid-a-day idea was also partly inspired by this project and TED talk about keeping personal data about yourself and finding fun ways to illustrate communicate it.

My original plan was to take one picture a day from when I started in April and “analyze” these pictures to see what caught my attention this year. This didn’t end up happening, but I did capture a lot of fun memories with these polaroids, and I am going to try again next year! You can also follow this project here! I’m hoping to share more polaroids more frequently this next year.

Polaroids definitely get expensive, but there are so many ways to get creative and learn about yourself and watch yourself change and grow. A lot of these things, people engage with all the time but may not realize that they are ways of keeping personal data. For example

• Journaling, and keeping track of the good things that happened every day and the things you wish would have been better
• Making a to-do list and tracking how many of your tasks/chores you actually accomplish
• Keeping track of places you like to eat, what foods you liked and what you liked about them (Side note- have you seen my boston bucket list?? I’m pretty proud of this and happy to share it with you ❤ . Some of these are chain restaurants, there are a few museums on there too but mostly these are just places in boston I’ve visited or which I’m looking forward to visiting! Also send me your recs if you have any)

These are some of the things that I’m into! But I’ve met people who also collect records or blu-rays; people who collect art. I just think it’s interesting to see what you can learn about people based on how they choose to document important aspects of their lives and one way to do so is through is by looking at what types of things they collect. My close family and friends and the moments I get to share with them are the most important to me which is why pictures/polaroids are my chosen medium.

Because I stayed in Boston over the summer, I got to see this city in all 4 of its seasons. I had crazy allergies in the Spring, but when I wasn’t sneezing and coughing I got to enjoy so many beautiful flowers!

In the summer when I wasn’t working on my fellowship I did make time to enjoy fun things in the city like this Boston Pizza festival. I was on a mission to find the best Pizza in this city, and we definitely got to try some amazing Pizza. It is still one of my goals to go on a little pizza tour in the North End, because it’s the part of Boston that I’ve explored the least. But that will have to wait until this next year.

And there is nothing like Fall in the northeast. I spent almost every day in October and November taking pictures of the beautiful leaves! I think my favorite place to see the leaves, though, was just behind my neighborhood in Brookline on the Riverway. One of my favorite memories from the season was this — this actually made me cry because I feel like I’ve never experienced something that made me feel so peaceful! I wish I could share what that moment felt like in real life, but these pictures will have to do for now.

I didn’t travel too far away from Boston this year because I was pretty much working the entire year including the summer.

I did go to SF over the summer and visited my family and did some touristy stuff there.

I did go out to Philly a couple times- once for the fourth of July and once for a close friend’s birthday, and I also visited Salem for the first time in October!

Another exciting moment for me this year- I finally got to show my twin sister around Boston! Jyoti just graduated from the University of Michigan this last Spring and started working at the Rocky Mountain Institute as an Associate.

She visited for Thanksgiving, and I had the chance to take her to some of my favorite places in Boston and cook up a thanksgiving feast for her and friends!

In this last part of the year, I visited Silverthorne, CO with a few friends. We stayed in this beautiful fancy house for 3 days- it was the perfect opportunity to practice romanticizing life because it felt like I’d walked straight into a hallmark movie.

We went snow tubing in Keystone, we visited Luminova, made candles at Paddywax, and got to catch up after a really long time. It was the perfect way to end the year and prepare for the next one!

There’s a line in the last episode of The Office which Andy says: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them”. I’ve been thinking about that line a lot lately. When you’re in the middle of a big chapter of your life like I am, and you aren’t exactly sure what the light at the end of the tunnel looks like, it’s natural to just wish that you could just get to the end and find out what happens. But this year if I’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s important to make every page in that chapter count, and to stop waiting for life to happen because it is happening for you right now.

These last few months of this year which have held some of the best of times and the worst of times of my life and focusing on turning the page has really helped. I’m 26, and I have so much life to live! I’m excited for everything this new year will bring.

Originally published at http://aartibodas.com on December 25, 2023.