I declared Course 9 (Brain & Cognitive Sciences).

Mostly because you're not allowed to declare course 20 (biological engineering), it being a new program -- you have to apply for it during sophomore year. Right now I'm planning on doing course 20 with large side helpings of 9 and 6 (CS), though depending on interest I may double-major after all. Especially because they are probably going to make the requirements for double-majoring a little less insane.

The 9 and 20 combination is because I'm being very strongly seduced by the awesomeness of bioengineering and synthbio, but I would really like to work on neurons (or glia) doing computations, among other possibilities. Definitely something lower-level than most stuff with the word "cognitive" in it, though. Not that that isn't extremely interesting and worthy of study, but... the lab bench calls to me in a way that words like "concepts" and "cognition" somehow don't.

By the way, it is to my advantage to declare a major instead of going undesignated, because this way I get an advisor in a department instead of remaining with my freshman advisor. There really aren't any consequences for declaring something with intent to change later, with enough planning ahead.

In other news, I may have finally become a real contributing member of my 20.20 project team. This is an excellent thing. While it is very stimulating to have to work hard to keep up with three upperclassmen, that doesn't work so well when in a bad mood -- then it's just frustrating as all hell. And it's not like this project won't be plenty challenging anyway.

It's surprisingly easy to forget that MIT is much more a research place than a teaching place. I tend to get all caught up in all the classes I have to take with "Intro" in the title. To be fair, even those classes include a significant workload. But it's far too easy to lose sight of all the crazy awesome research going on here, as well.

I'm trying to go to more talks now. They're not hard to find out about; it just requires a willingness to occasionally pause in the hallway and actually read some of the flyers, and if something catches my eye, write it down. Also, subscribing to *-announce mailing lists tends to help :-D

Synthetic biology seminars! Neurocog talks! Shiny things going on! Non-introductory material! Material presented at a level that I almost can't keep up with at all! Research! Squee!

Another thing is to walk along the hallways of buildings that aren't in the main group, on floors other than the first -- that's where lab spaces are, and where they tend to hang their posters. Maybe next semester I'll get a different UROP this way. (Working in the psycholx lab I'm in right now, while interesting in its own right, is not the field I actually want to go into.)

In other news, I'm being seduced by (a) the synthetic biology community and (b) biological computing, whether using molecules or neurons or what have you. So much shiny!