Aarti

2024

Posted on December 23, 2024December 27, 2024 by Aarti in Uncategorized

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.

Phd Stuff

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.

With my co-authors for my first symposium presentation at Cognitive Development Society 2024

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 🙂

2023

Posted on December 25, 2023December 24, 2024 by Aarti in Grad School, research

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.

This was taken on the day I finished data collection in May

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!

*In the Fall, one of my mentees, Ankita, presented at the UROP symposium- I’m so proud of her!*

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.

2022: my first full year in boston

Posted on December 31, 2022January 22, 2023 by Aarti in Boston, Grad School, research

Like every year, 2022 was filled with plenty of highs and lows. But unlike the last several years, 2022 was the first year when I truly lived away from home for most of the time, since the last several years of graduate school for me have been disrupted by COVID.

Living away from home is hard to say the least. But so many good things have come out of my decision to move to Boston, so I wanted to take a moment to celebrate all of that and my first true year of adventure in 2022.

2022 was a year of many firsts. It was my first year living in Boston, over 3,000 miles across the country from my home in Seattle. It was my first full year of grad school when I was able to go back to classes in-person after the pandemic- something I feel very lucky for.

Going through my 2 year Master’s program when I wasn’t able to see or talk to the other people in my program was pretty rough. One of the reasons why I picked my program at BU was because this program felt like a very tight-knit and supportive community, so it was really important to me over this last year to get to know everyone and make connections in my program and in Boston generally.

One of the best parts of doing grad school in Boston is how easy it is to network and build community. I’m so lucky because the people in my program have been awesome. Even when I was first moving to Boston, several people offered lots of advice to help me find an apartment, to look at apartments with me, and even to help me move in and this was before we knew each other well enough to be friends!

During my first year, everyone in years above me was always willing to help with homework, share resources and in almost every sense has been supportive.

This was also the first year we were able to travel to attend an in-person conference! This was my very first CDS, and my first-time visiting Madison, WI.

I presented two posters, one about my Master’s thesis project at Villanova University about children’s science learning from television media, and another poster on behalf of the Child Cognition Lab, about our Evolving Minds curriculum project.

The four of us that went from our program at BU also made it a point to visit the weekend farmer’s market and as many different local coffee shops, bars and restaurants as we could manage. Even though this was an academic conference, it was also a nice little break from usual research life.

a year filled with so much good food!

Even though I technically went to school in the Philly area for 2 years and the Seattle area for 4 years, I (sadly) didn’t explore either city very much. Despite calling the Seattle area for my entire life, I’m not the right person to go to when it comes to finding cool places to eat and explore.

I didn’t want to make the same mistake in Boston, especially since I’ll be here for at least 5 years.

There are still many places I have left to try, but I decided to make brunch a priority. I love brunch. There’s just something about dressing up, eating breakfast food, having fruity drinks and spilling the tea (iykyk) that brings the kind of joy that cannot be found elsewhere.

If I had it my way, I’d be at brunch every single weekend, especially because there are so many great places to brunch in Boston. My top places this year were:

ArtBar: Their chicken and waffles is the absolute best, they are right by the water and they have some of the best seasonal cocktails

Trident Booksellers: While I didn’t love the food here as much as other places, I love how cozy this little bookstore is! When the weather is nice they have outdoor seating and since this place is right on Newbury it’s a good opportunity to people watch

Cafe Landwer: This place is good any time of the day, including brunch. Although their food is good, what I loved the most was their nutella latte, and this other blue cocktail they had with gummy fish in it. I think it was called the Fishbowl?

Some of the other spots I tried include Frenchie (which had really great croissants, mimosas, and this yummy nutella and banana crepe), Sonsie (great mimosas), Tatte (relatively common in Boston but great food and good vibes), Flour (their chicken tikka naan sandwich is so good), Milkweed (everything is good, but they get crowded!) and the Friendly Toast (can get a bit crowded but also really good).

And brunch is obviously not the only meal I eat, there are tons of places I haven’t even mentioned. And there are still so many places left to try! Some other places I really enjoyed include Thaitation, which is my new favorite Thai restaurant in the Boston area. There’s also tons of cafes and coffee shops I really loved.

If you need coffee, in terms of coffee chains I think Cafe Nero is my go-to spot in Boston, followed closely by Pavement. If you’re looking for a more unique coffee experience, I really love Cafe Phinista in Fenway, which is a French Vietnamese style cafe. If you’re looking for Indian food, nothing beats Punjabi Dhaba in Cambridge.

I’m hoping to try more pizza places in the area next year, and I have yet to explore Boston’s North End!

playing tourist in boston

Boston is such a beautiful city, and one of my favorite things about it is how close together everything is. Because of that, and because of how easy it is to make connections across different institutions, in some ways it feels a lot more close knit than what you might expect out of a city.

And there’s no better way to see a city than to drag your friends out to come see it with you! I had a few friends come to visit me this year, so I took advantage of these visits to see places I might not ordinarily make time to go to.

My favorite museum to take friends to is definitely the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. This museum is small so you can see all of it within a couple hours, and it has the most beautiful courtyard. It’s also the site of the biggest art heist in American history. There are lots of museums you can visit for free as a BU student. For BU students this museum is free, and for anyone with a valid student ID tickets are only $13! The Museum of Fine Arts is also free for BU students! But this museum is fairly large, so I’m definitely planning on making another trip. The Boston Public Library is free for everyone, and is also a must-see. They also have afternoon tea (but it’s $50/person), but that’s something I’m looking forward to doing sometime in the future.

There are also other ways to get around and see Boston on a budget (which I haven’t taken advantage of yet but plan to soon!). For example (as this reel points out), having a Boston Public Library card can get you free tickets to the Science Museum (come say hi!), the Aquarium and inexpensive tickets to the ICA.

Boston also has a lot of beautiful waterfronts. Seaport is a must sea (lol) while you’re in the city, but there are lots of beaches that are just around the corner and accessible by commuter rail, like Rockport and Nahant. The commuter rail is only $10 on the weekends for unlimited rides. Plans for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are in the works for the next couple years as well!

But what was i actually doing in grad school?

While I have been having a lot of fun this last year, hopefully it doesn’t sound like the only things I’ve been doing this last year have been eating and going around to fun places. There was a lot of progress on the research front, too!

When I first came to BU, I was really interested in exploring how social identity influences the way that people think about science. More specifically, I was really interested in answering the question of why some people love science so much while some people don’t trust scientific information or scientists, and think that science is boring or difficult.

The research that my lab does focuses generally on how children reason scientifically when it comes to lots of different topics. For example, our educational curriculum intervention project, the Evolving Minds project, examines children’s learning about Evolution by Natural Selection. The research that is led by the other graduate student in my lab, Lizette, focuses on children’s reasoning about the earth and the natural world.

I found that my research interests about children’s scientific reasoning were more closely aligned with some of our lab’s other work, on how children perceive different kinds of explanations when it comes to learning science. I combined this with my interest in the role of identity on children’s science learning.

Based on these questions, I currently have 2 projects– one for kids and one for adults and kids– up and running at the Boston Museum of Science. Our research team has been at the Museum almost every weekend since last summer, and we’ve had the opportunity to interview lots of kids and adults and learn about how they think about science topics.

In fact, within the last year my research team has interviewed ~200 participants for my studies, and probably ~300 or more for our labs’ research projects. Even though interviewing participants can be tiring, it is probably my favorite part of the research process because it is an opportunity to see how people think about and respond to the questions we ask them, and the responses that people give can often spark new research ideas. And, getting to hear from kids is so much fun! Sometimes I wonder how I would respond if I were an 8-year-old doing one of my studies.

Apart from interviewing participants at the museum, my grad school life this last year has consisted of classes, a few presentations, mentoring undergraduate students, collaborative meetings, and lots and lots of writing. It’s been hard for me to say no to lots of opportunities because there’s so much going on! But overall I’ve been having a blast, and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.

opening an etsy shop

One of the things I’m most proud of this year was finally starting my Etsy shop. I’ve been knitting these scarves since 2019 as a way of relieving anxiety, and when I started my Master’s at Villanova I started selling them to whoever wanted one. I’ve been thinking about starting an Etsy for at least a couple years, but got overwhelmed every time I thought about it because running an Etsy shop is a whole other job in itself!

But, since the only New Year’s resolution I had for 2022 was living my best life, I just decided to go for it.

I named my Etsy shop, Sudha Scarves, after my paternal grandmother who loves crafting as well, and who loves children and might be the only other person in my family who has studied child psychology and development at least to some extent. I wanted to use this Etsy shop to donate towards this cause.

I set a goal of raising at least $300, and though I didn’t meet this goal after subtracting the costs for all of my expenses, I still learned so much and I’m looking forward to continuing this project next year. In February 2023, some of my scarves will be sold at the Thomas Jefferson High School annual auction.

What I’m looking forward to in 2023

My goals for 2023 include traveling to more places on the east coast, trying more delicious food in Boston, and, on a more professional level, trying to identify ways to better manage my time. It’s crazy to think about everything that has happened in this last year, but I’m looking forward to another year of moments worth celebrating.

All about APS

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Aarti in conferences, research, Student Voices

On the morning of Wednesday, May 22^nd, I got up at 3:30 AM to go on one of my most exciting career-related adventures yet! The Association for Psychological Science Convention. This was the first big psychology conference that I had the opportunity to participate in.

A short summary of my experience? I had a blast!

A slightly more detailed one? I learned so much, and I’m excited for what lies ahead of me as I advance in this field.

Continue reading →

‘Scientific Collaboration Means Collective Celebration’: My First Experience Planning and Presenting at a Research Conference

Posted on March 6, 2019March 6, 2019 by Aarti in research, Student Voices

The first annual Northwest Social Cognitive Development Conference (NSCDC) was my first ever research conference, and the first time I was able to assist in organizing a research conference. The purpose of this conference was to gather researchers from all across the Cascadia Corridor to discuss and present on current topics in developmental science, specifically pertaining to social and cognitive development. I did a poster presentation about my current project on infants’ prosocial expectations. Aside from being my first presentation opportunity, I also had the chance to network with many talented researchers and professionals in the field, and learn from their work and experiences in academia.

Continue reading “‘Scientific Collaboration Means Collective Celebration’: My First Experience Planning and Presenting at a Research Conference” →