Learning to Find Connections Where There Were None
The first thing a first-year student has to do is take a look around when she arrives at the college which will be her home for the next four years. She has to walk up and down the stairs in her dorm; she has to walk around her dorm room and take in the unfamiliar smell which will blend with her own; she has to walk the paths sprawled all around campus. She has to create in her mind a network connecting everything with everything new. The crucial change that occurs in one’s first year in college is the absorption of everything new, building connections between those things, and learning to stand up on them and use them to create.
Entering a new college, state, or country requires a wondrous and tormenting period of adaptation. On my first night at Bates, also my first night in the United States, I woke up about six times and looked around each time to remember where I was. I also hardly understood my roommate’s accent and forgot the names of most people I met. As I was adapting, just like everyone else in our freshman class, I got used to my various new friends and to all the new activities. I did this by getting to know my friends and activities, finding similarities and differences between them, and building a network of connections between them. This allowed me to feel calm and think about how to push further.
As I learned later in Neuroscience class, neurons let us learn, think, and create by changing their shape, talking to neurons they have never talked to before, and building new connections. The similarity of what my brain does and what I did throughout my freshman year is striking. It makes me think that our fear of change is unnatural and man-made. A new beginning is usually met with excitement as well as anxiety, while it seems to me our neurons don’t tremble with terror when we plunge into a new experience: they simply keep on making new connections. Freshman year made me adopt this attitude, at least to the extent that my constantly thinking and doubting mind can let me. Making connections between various things helped me find my way of thinking about them, which gave me some certainty that even new things can fit together if one only rotates them freely enough in her mind and looks at them from different angles.
Once I had built those new connections and felt comfortable with most of them and most of myself, it turned out I, as well as my classmates, had made the first swing from a long swim across a wide sea: many more new experiences and changes awaited us. Surprising and opportunistic as this was, it was quite annoying to know my poor neurons had gone through so much trouble only to go through ten thousand times more. But it all started to fit. In a conversation with some friends, we were debating something, when my breathing quickened and I forgot to finish the sentence I had started. Little bits of my psychology, economics, philosophy, and dance classes had come together. Add several pinches from sports, books, and simple everyday interactions, and there was my bright, still vague, and breath-taking idea. I was afraid that it was an accident and that such an idea would never show mercy and down upon me again, but my neurons did not give me up. They allowed me to find similarities and differences between things and continuously form ideas by making their new connections. And so, I keep on making my connections because this is what my neurons and my freshman year have taught me.
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