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Right Place, Right Time

July 1, 2012 in Alumni Blogs by npadilla | 7 comments

Follow your dreams. That seems to be a theme of my posts, but that is because I truly believe it. There are so many opportunities to do so at Harvard too—everything from growing your own vegetables, to engaging in political discourse, to theatre troupes with a long history. Yet the wealth of resources can also make us veer of course.

 

I (perhaps unfortunately?) was not one of the students that changed my major as often as I immersed in Lamont to study. Partly because all the departmental intro meetings often have delicious, free food at them, but mostly because for my first two years I was so entrenched in pre-college major that I didn’t give myself the freedom to explore callings that arose.

It wasn’t until junior year that I explored the Mind-Brain-Behavior Track Program & Philosophy Department. In senior year I took on classes in anthropology & history, and realized my dream was at the intersection of all of these courses, departments, and teachers: food education, nutrition policy, and cultural foodways.

 

Instead of jumping into a job the day after graduation, I took on a fellowship to research the artisanal food movement (which I begin this week!), and completed a yoga teacher training (YTT) program that spoke to my interest in healthy & holistic healing (complementary to nutrition). Its scary to take the road less travelled, but in doing so, you may just realize (as I did) that its the path your meant for.

 

Indeed, if I never stayed in Boston and did the YTT, I would never have met the amazing owner of the studio in which we did our YTT (Karma Yoga), Jesse Widner. Through Jesse I became involved with helping and expanding his non-profit C.A.R.E, (the Community Animal Rescue and Education organization) into new projects I probably will update more as the summer goes on and plans become solidified. I’ve found this work an extremely satisfying way of bring together my varied passions of community, yoga, healing, and education.

My YTT Tribe & Jesse in the middle at Karma Yoga!

So, wherever you end up, follow your desire and carve the path you want. More updates on a summer in Boston—including the beginning of the fellowship and my evolving working with C.A.R.E—to come.

 

~Natalie

 

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Get on Track

April 6, 2012 in Alumni Blogs by npadilla | 2 comments

Last year, as I sought to get my life in perspective, someone told me that yours choices after college are so hard because your whole life you were learning and increasing your areas of knowledge until after college you start whittling down you path narrower and narrower. I could immediately see why I was attracted to the secondary (also known as a “minor” in other schools) I ended up choosing, “Mind, Brain, Behavior”.

 

Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MBB) is a track program, which means that you can take classes from a number of related (and seemingly unrelated) departments and combine those classes into a concentration (major) or secondary. There’s a few other “track programs” such as this and it is great because it allows for exploration and a widening of knowledge that a single department concentration (e.g., government, English) often doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’m concentrating in government myself, but the track program is a great opportunity to take advantage of and really offers a holistic education.

 

Consider the list of MBB departments that have integrated into the track program: Computer Science, History and Science, Human Evolutionary Biology, Linguistics, Neurobiology, Philosophy, and Psychology. The research in each department tends to tie into all the others anyway, so its great to integrate them through taking a variety of classes and utilizing the knowledge in a cohesive thesis (senior project).

 

Since I only did it as a secondary, my thesis was specific instead to my concentration. MBB as an integrated track program is a honors program, so that anyone who concentrates in it is required to do a thesis. But there are a number of other great track programs at Harvard to consider as well. One of the most popular, and my roommate’s, is Social Studies (also a honors program).

 

What sounds like a middle school history course is actually a great combination of the social sciences including government, economics, and statistics, among others. For your senior thesis, you even get to come up with an individualized focus field that you can then use to write about your thesis (“Inequality in the United States;” “Development in Africa”).

 

So if you are about to make your venture into college, embrace all the opportunities you can for exploration and widening your knowledge—you may be surprised at the cohesiveness of it all.

 

Hope you all have a great week!

 

PS. I thought since I didn’t have that many cool photos to go with this week’s post, I would supply you with a random photo from my week around Cambridge. Just walk down the street in this city and you come across the best things–for example, here, two Cambridge locals (Ben & Jerry’s and B.Good) giving out free donation-based ice cream & milkshakes).

~Natalie

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