Summer plans by Jessie L. '07

I’ve spent the last two weeks enjoying a nice vacation at my mom’s house in Louisville, Kentucky. It’s been great, and I might even have caught up on all the sleep I missed during term (for some reason, while I’m on campus, I have trouble sleeping more than 8 or 8 and a half hours even if there’s no reason for me to get up, and usually get less, but when I’m here, I feel deprived if I’m not getting at least 9). But tomorrow, it ends.

Tomorrow, I get on a plane and fly to Newark, New Jersey. At Newark, I switch planes and fly to Geneva, Switzerland. From Geneva, I take the train to Lausanne, and find the boarding house that I’ll be living in for the next two months, for my summer internship at EPFL (the Swiss Institute of Technology).

I’m working at the Brain Mind Institute, in the Laboratory for Neural Microcircuitry. I’ll be helping with the Blue Brain Project, a joint venture between EPFL and IBM to computationally model the mammalian neocortex. Such a model could have huge implications for the field. I’ve even heard it compared to the Human Genome Project in its scope and usefulness, and I feel honored to be working on it.

I’ll be blogging from there, of course, and taking pictures of Switzerland to show you. Don’t expect anything too soon, though – I’ll need a chance to get settled in. :)

By the way, I’ve discovered that if you read this blog through the Livejournal feed that Riv ’07 created, it doesn’t automatically show if there’s an extended entry. Now, I’ve only had two extended entries, ever, but they’ve both been recent, so I figured this was worth mentioning.