When you were young, maybe you had a dream. You were going to fly to the moon, pass EC 5, cure cancer. Then you grew up. You cut your hair, chose your major, changed your outlook. You changed a lot, but did you change your dream?
First-yearJessie Lan spent last night engaged in a deep, unfiltered conversation with her roommate, but before she had a roommate whom she could tag in memes, she had two parents whom she could ask questions. She says, “The typical child is always like, ‘Why? Why? Why?’, and then their parents get annoyed. That was also me.” Jessie’s parents got annoyed, and then they got her the game "Ace Attorney" to play on her brother’s Nintendo DS. In the game, she served as a dauntless defense attorney, fearlessly foiling the evil machinations of her opposing prosecutor. Jessie recalls that at the age of 10, “I liked the idea of helping people, saving them, finding out exactly what went wrong with the witness testimony.”
Jessie loved spotting inconsistencies in the characters’ commentaries, and her discerning ear for detail extended far beyond the virtual confines of her video game. She remarks that in her everyday life, “I would try to play devil’s advocate and probe deeper. If someone said a statement, I’d be like, ‘Is that really what you mean?’” As a young girl, Jessie dreamed of becoming a CIA analyst so that she could “discover the secrets of every single mystery,” but in high school, her AP Language class clued her in to a valuable piece of introspective insight. She explains, “When you’re thinking about rhetoric and the way that authors use words, it relates to their purpose and why they chose those words specifically. That brings you to thought and articulating in language, which leads to linguistics and that brings you to cognitive science.”
Eventually, then, a car brought her to Tufts in August, and this semester, Jessie expects the class Introduction to Cognitive and Brain Sciences to bring her much satisfaction. She says, “I want to know how the brain becomes more than just a brain, how it formulates the mind and consciousness.” In essence, Jessie wants to learn how the brain spreads ideas, so at Tufts, she has joined TEDxTufts, the motto of which is “Ideas worth spreading.” Although part of Jessie still wants to become the “super cool detective” that she envisioned as a child, at TEDx, she won’t have to do much sleuthing in order to uncover people’s passions. She comments, “I like learning what makes people tick and hearing what they’re excited about" and conveniently enough, the TEDx platform is largely dedicated to disseminating dreams.
For now, Jessie is just dedicated to the schoolwork that she finds so fascinating. She reveals, “I know what I like learning about, but I don’t know what career I want to come out of that.” Thus, in order to determine a suitable career for herself, Jessie gets to undertake some investigative work. Much like in the games she played on her DS, she just has to identify what she calls “the missing piece.”
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