Commencement 2017

Campus Life – UConn Today

Why did you decide to attend UConn?I came for Admitted Students Day, but I didn’t take a formal tour or anything. I ended up walking around on my own so I could really see what the campus was like. I felt a strong sense of community on campus, which was important to me. No matter where I went to school, I wanted to feel like I had a home.

What is the greatest learning experience you’ve had at UConn?Definitely research! I have been a part of my current research lab since my first semester. Thinking about how much I’ve grown in that lab is really incredible. Coming in, I didn’t know what research really was; I didn’t understand it. And here I am working on my honors senior thesis, which is my own independent project. My experiences in the lab have taught me the ins and outs of research, how to work well with other people, and how to deal with disappointment. Disappointment is a huge part of the learning process!

What kind of lab experience have you had at UConn?I’m working in the behavioral neuroscience division under associate professor of psychological sciences Robert Astur. He runs a lot of different projects, so I’ve worked on studies with fear conditioning, which have implications for PTSD research; estrogen studies about how different levels of estrogen affect learning and memory; and I’ve done motivation studies with primary and secondary reinforcers. The primary reinforcer in our study was food, so the whole project had implications for eating disorder risk.

I’m working on my senior thesis now, which is a behavioral analysis of hippocampal function. We’re placing all of our participants on a schizotypical personality disorder spectrum, to look at whether a person on one end of the spectrum has better ...

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