2024
When I started the fall semester of my fourth year, we did an icebreaker during our first lab meeting and everyone had to answer the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. People talked about where they saw themselves living, what kind of jobs they saw themselves doing, the kind of family they pictured themselves having, the pets they saw themselves adopting and anything else that came to mind. As I was thinking about my answer to this question, I realized that though my life is imperfect, at the current moment there is nothing about it that I’d change. I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
This was big for me because I have spent a large part of the last three years anxious about decisions I’ve made in the past and anxious about things to come in the future. Though I feel both apprehension and excitement about this next year, being able to feel present in every moment is definitely something that I wanted for myself as a grown-up.
Twenty-twenty four was a whirlwind. It brought some of my happiest and also my most stressful moments. Here is a recap of the best parts of the year.
The first couple months of 2024 were spent focusing on three really big research talks- my first research talks ever! Two of them were at the Cognitive Development Society conference in Pasadena, and the third was at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference, in Philadelphia.
In the previous year, I didn’t really get a chance to present any of my work because all of it was in progress and not in a state to be shared. But thanks to a lot of effort from my research team, I was able to finish collecting data on two huge projects and both were accepted for symposium presentations across these two different conferences! This was a big moment for me career-wise.
The first talk I presented was about a project examining how U.S. elementary-aged children evaluate different types of explanations about non-living natural objects (think rocks, lakes, mountains, and other things you may see outside that aren’t alive). This project also examined whether there was a relationship between children’s sense of belonging in science (science identity) and children’s abilities to evaluate explanations. More specifically, this project examined whether having a stronger sense of identity with science makes children better at detecting “good” and “bad” explanations.
The 2nd talk (which was part of the symposium I co-organized) asked a related question- when children and adults are asked questions about non-living natural objects, what kinds of answers do they spontaneously provide, and how often do these tend to be good scientific explanations (in this case, explanations that provide details about cause-and-effect)? This project also asked about how having a sense of belonging in science influences the kinds of explanations people provide, and whether these explanations are related to how much people see science as a part of everyday life.
My talk at AERA presented some of these same results, but a few of our measures on science elitism (people’s thoughts on who can do science, and who cannot).
Overall, having a lower sense of belonging in science does not stop children or adults from generating scientifically relevant explanations in response to scientific questions. However, whether people are able to feel a sense of belonging may be influenced by other aspects of their views, like whether or not they see science as elitist (i.e., not for everyone). And while it may be important for people to feel a sense of belonging in science from a young age, having a higher sense of belonging with science also does not seem to protect children from falling for misinformation.
I have a lot of ideas moving forward from these projects of what I can ask next and what topics I’m interested in exploring. It’s becoming clear that it may be a good idea create more diverse, less stereotypical public portrayals of what scientists look like to make more people feel included in science learning and working spaces: Do all people in scientific fields work in labs with beakers and chemicals? Are they all nerds with crazy hair, and do they all wear lab coats? What might be the effect of promoting this narrow image of science and scientists on children’s understanding of science?
I’ve been interested in this question since I started grad school, and I’m excited to write up some of my work answering this question in the next year!
I’m now also on the last half of my degree program- which feels crazy. It feels like I moved to Boston just yesterday. Even though there is a lot of work (and tons and tons of writing!) ahead, I’m determined to enjoy it as much as I can because after I finish this degree, I will never be able to call myself a student again.
Other life stuff
This next February is my golden birthday. Which makes this last year my golden year! In many ways this last year has felt really special. In February, some of my close friends threw me a surprise party for my birthday and I felt so special to have all of these amazing people show up to celebrate me.
In March, my graduate program traveled to Pasadena to present at CDS. We also took some time before and after the conference to visit LA, where I had never been before. We did some road-tripping and visited several of the beaches and drove through the mountains and by the coast. Conferences are some of the only times I get to travel outside of the Boston area so it felt like a dream come true to get to stay an extra couple of days and really make the most of our time there.
In April, I made the trip to Philadelphia for AERA. I got to see one of my closest friends and meet her husband for the first time, my brother-in-law.
Towards the end of the month, we also skipped school to watch the solar eclipse from a nearby field. We also celebrated the engagement of one of my close friends.
As it was also the start of the warmer months, we closed the month by visiting the tulip fields at Wards Berry farm. I’d actually been waiting to visit a tulip field for YEARS- we used to go all the time when me and my sister were kids. It was a yearly tradition for a few years to visit the fields, pick some tulips and then get ice cream from the local stands nearby. This year I went with one of my close friends, Adine and I hope it’s a tradition we will keep for the coming years.
In the middle of my busy summer of data collection, a couple of my friends also whisked me away on a weekend adventure to New York 🙂 One of them had tickets to watch the India-Pakistan cricket match and the other two of us spent the weekend wandering through the city.
During this weekend I also got to see a close friend from my time at Villanova who now lives in the city and works as a research scientist. It has been almost 5 years since I’ve gotten to see her in person because the pandemic broke up our time during the Master’s degree and during our second year we did not really get to see each other in person.
Earlier in the summer, my Ravneet and Taran also came to visit me in Boston and we also made a day trip out to Cape Cod.
In July, my parents visited me in Boston for the first time since I moved here. We made a trip to Martha’s Vineyard and I got to show them around the city as well.
In the fall I connected with many friends who love the beautiful leaves as much as I do! We made the most of our season, especially since Fall in the New England area is perhaps the most beautiful in the country.
Happily, the fall also brought me another visit from Ravneet and Taran.
I also got to visit Vermont in the fall for the first time ever! Four of us in the psych program made a day trip and we had so much fun we decided to make it a yearly thing. Walking under the tall trees with red, yellow, green leaves made me feel so peaceful. I would love to go back in the Winter time to see what the area looks like then.
I can’t conclude this post about this year without talking about the election. On the eve of the election, a few friends and I decided to distract ourselves from refreshing the results every five seconds by seeing &Juliet performed at the Boston Opera House. I loved that show- and it’s quite possibly the best thing that we could have watched that night. Juliet gets to re-write her story and take control of it instead of ending her life at only 13 years old (can you believe that- 13??) she gets to create a new identity as her own person. I felt hope for myself and other women who are still figuring out their own identities, which was very much needed given the sense of dread I felt the next day.
I have a lot of thoughts about the results of the election and what they mean for the future of this country and the world. It doesn’t feel appropriate to lay them all out here, but not acknowledging the sense of apprehension I have for the coming years also feels dishonest. What I can say is that in my eyes, climate and environmental scientists, social scientists, healthcare workers and researchers, teachers, education policy experts and researchers and others whose career trajectories will be threatened by the next administration: the work matters now more than ever.
This year I also got to come home for both Thanksgiving and the Christmas Break. It’s been at least 4–5 years since I’ve been able to spend thanksgiving with my family. During thanksgiving break we also got to meet up with our friend Simreet after a long time and make pizza together.
I flew back to Boston briefly before returning home again for the holidays, and our last PhD outing took us to the Nutcracker and to Snowport.
While I’ve been home for December break I haven’t been as good about reaching out to friends and family as I’d like to be. I’ve been working on putting together a paper almost every morning. But once this paper is done, I’ll officially be a PhD candidate and will be able to move on to proposing my dissertation. There is definitely a lot going on currently, a lot of hard work ahead.
What’s ahead
Every coming year the way I think about making the most of my life changes a little. I spent a lot of this last year recovering from difficulties which originated in 2023, including a graduate student strike that happened in this last academic year and concluded this October that I haven’t even touched on here. I spent a lot of 2024 looking for things to change and feeling dissatisfied because these things did not come quickly. I had to work on being patient, focusing on what was in my control, and remaining hopeful despite facing uncertainties. Change did come eventually, but it took a lot of hard work.
This next year, making the most of my life is going to mean focusing on appreciating the opportunities that I have. In the coming weeks in January I will be going to India to visit my family after about 12 years, in February I plan to submit another paper for publication, in March I have plans to visit a close friend in New York and in May I plan to attend another conference and deliver another talk on a dissertation-related project. In July, we might get to visit Bali! And in-between, I plan to work diligently and make the most of my free moments by seeing more of Boston and the New England area (including a possible winter trip to Maine!), and spending as much time with my friends and family as I possibly can. I don’t know what is to come in the following year, but I know that I have these things to look forward to.
Happy end of 2024 and start of 2025 to whoever is reading this, and I wish you the best for this next year 🙂
Originally published at http://aartibodas.com on December 23, 2024.
