With Faculty Mentorship, a Psychology Major Pursues Research Around the World

I took AP Psychology in high school and wanted to try it at Dartmouth. My first term, when studying for tests, I got curious about the concepts and looked into them beyond the course content. That’s how I sensed that I was interested in psychology. I also really enjoy the statistical methods that we use—how do you transform the trends in data into a conclusion that people can understand?

We’re trying to understand how visual recognition works, and our focus is on face processing. We’re interested in processes concerned primarily with the occipital and temporal lobes, the parts of the brain which process visual and auditory information. Specifically, we’re interested in understanding how they work and what happens when they don’t work properly (in the case of prosopagnosia, also called face blindness, for example).

For my senior thesis, I did brain imaging with fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. I recruited participants and sent them into the scanner, which looks like a big donut, showed them images of faces, and then analyzed how their brain activity varied with each face. I learned a whole slew of research skills, from conceptualization to presentation.

Dartmouth is a sweet spot for undergraduate research. You have a lot of opportunities to work with people who are experts in their field. It’s a lot easier to get into a lab here than it is at a lot of places because of the student-to-faculty ratio.

Dartmouth has generous support for anyone who needs it. I received $20,000 through Dartmouth’s Stamps Scholarship Program to create my own psychology internship in China. I was on a computational cognitive neuroscience (computer brain modeling) initiative at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where I used large language models—GPTs—to see if they could diagnose depression from children’s sketches. Professors at Dartmouth have connections all over the globe, and my research experience in China was really supported by Professor Duchaine.

What’s more important than where you go to college is what you do when you’re there. I’d like to relieve some pressure from prospective students because I think there’s too much emphasis on where you go.

A college education is just so different from high school. You don’t have to stick to one specific path. I’ve had a lot of friends who are switching their majors in their senior year, which is totally possible—Dartmouth can support that. Don’t be afraid to explore.