I know a lot of people in my life, including my friends and family, wonder why in the world I would choose majoring in cognitive science over something more well-known or something that would make me rich. I was very skeptical of it at first, too, because I really, truly just wanted to take the straight-cut path to neuroscience (mostly because of my reading list). However, when I went to Oswego's admitted student's day, Dr. Early, a computer science professor at the college told us that cog sci was actually the perfect segue into neuro! As I continued through the program at Oswego, I've found that cognitive science is what I wanted to do all along.
Learning about topics from my psychology and cognitive science classes truly allowed me to become immersed in my favorite parts of cog sci. Through my first linguistics class, I got sucked into a rabbit hole of research on bilingualism and multiple language acquisitions. In my second cog sci class, I learned about aphantasia, which I am now doing research on with one of my favorite professors so that I can learn more about my own brain (and the similarities between my brain and others'). Some of the psychology classes i've taken have also allowed me to gain further topics i'm interested in, such as the prefrontal cortex and its relation to social development, as well as the amygdala's role in anger/emotion control. Memory, emotion, social/cultural topics are something I have only learned a little bit about in my psych classes, but they've shaped my research interests for the better. What really fascinates me is that the brain (and the mind) is so vast and there's so much that we don't know, so every time I hear of a new theory in my classes it adds 10 topics onto the list of things I would love to study. (Almost) everything in cog sci is interesting to me, and we're only learning more and more as time goes on.
And that is why I chose to stick with cognitive science. The field is ever-changing based on new floods of knowledge coming in with each new discovery, and I won't have to be bound by the rigidity of other, less interdisciplinary fields. Cognitive science is my new home, and I intend to stay here for a very, very long time.
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