I’m sitting here listening to @starstrickenSF and @biologistimo talk about being passionate about their science and allowing the knowledge catch up with that passion as they learn. And I feel like I’ve related to this so much in my short short journey into neuroscience.

It started with my own brain fighting against me after concussion after concussion. And learning was hard, it physically hurt to do chemistry and I had to come to school early and stay late to get help with calculus.

And then I got to undergrad and got this research internship that I was entirely unqualified for. And my whole world was opened up, I got to ask all these biological questions and design experiments to answer them and I just fell in love.

And then I just tumbled through the higher level classes of neurobio, and medical neuroscience, and molecular bio, and started to actually refine all my questions to experimentally answerable and explorable questions.

And then I graduated undergrad and got this incredible job in a REAL neuroscience lab. And the on the job learning was just exponential. And I guess I didn’t really realize how much I had learned and grown in my 1.5 years in my lab.

But then in one of my grad school interviews, I got asked “what is the most important question you can ask by studying structural plasticity?”

And my goodness I just bubbled over with all of my ideas for what I want to study one day in ‘MY’ lab. And how we could look at Alzheimer’s disease from the synaptic plasticity level, to the cellular level, to the circuit level, ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

And I’m so excited to go and get my PhD and keep learning how to learn. And anyways at this point I’m just rambling (2 margaritas in) about how much I love learning about brains.

But overall thank you @starstrickenSF and @biologistimo for inspiring this thread that no one will read about how passion can come first and knowledge will follow and you don’t have to be inherently ‘good’ at math or science to be a scientist. Send tweet.