Today I got the opportunity to go visit and take a tour of Mills College. When you get on campus the roads are lined with trees, there is a lot of plant life, and they have streams running through campus as well. I really appreciated that since nature has always been a place for me to get away, it keeps me happy and calm. Also having a beautiful campus inspires people to go outside more often or at least to hang out near a window where they can see outside and that way they are able to get some sunlight exposure which will cause your brain to release a hormone called serotonin that will help with being calm and focused. Why don’t we all just study in the sunlight? The tour I took was lead by a junior who was double majoring in theater and history, an ambassador for her college, and is involved in multiple clubs. So when I asked her “Does the amount of work you get assigned ever make you feel hopeless?” she replied with “Yes! All the time but, that is self inflicted. I’m a bit of an overachiever so I want to go above and beyond what is needed.”. Next I asked if her professors cared about her doing well both in and out of class. She told me that when she feels too overwhelmed she can talk to her professors and they understand what she is dealing with and they will accommodate to her needs. The last thing I asked her is if she felt like she could trust the faculty in her school to help her out with anything she was having issues with and she told me that because of the small classes (12 students to 1 professor) she is able to create relationships with her professors and they really do care for her well being. While going to school at Mills College students have access to an on campus doctor that is available in their student health center building and 8 hours of counseling for whenever it may be needed in their counseling building.
0 Comments
This week we got to present the process of out Teen Brain Health project at Festival Del Sol. Since this exhibition is such a big deal at our school it is usually one of the most stressful times of the year. However this year in both my biology and humanities class we were nowhere near finishing our projects and getting them exhibition ready. So this year we presented our process so far and the exhibitions for our final products will be in about a month. I’m glad we are giving ourselves time to create our best work because of something we read in class every week called The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide To Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz. In the fourth agreement Ruiz talks about always doing your best without pushing yourself too much. “Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick.” “Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgement, self-abuse, and regret”. And I feel like that is really what we did. I think reading those agreements was really helpful because I think it really applied to what we are doing in school. I feel like it has really made school and working hard more positive than it was before. Even though we didn’t finish our project we all put in our best work and best efforts to make sure our process was presented well. When our final exhibitions come I think we will all be ready to show all the hard work and effort that we put into both of our projects this semester. I think the most important thing about depression that people should know is that everybody has a limit to the amount and severity of things they can handle and no one’s limit is the same. You may look at what someone who is depressed and see what they are dealing with and think “What they are dealing with is not even that bad.” but for them it could be the worst thing they have ever dealt with before. To stop this type of thinking I want to do an activity at my exhibition that will hopefully give people who don’t understand depression well a chance to gain a little understanding of what people with depression deal with on a day to day basis. The activity consists of completing daily tasks while carrying weight in a backpack. I chose to do the activity like this because I’ve heard many people describe depression as a weight they have to lug around wherever they go. We want to give different people different amounts of weight to display different severities of depression.Another thing we would like to do is time it all to make it a little more fun by being a race. I think that the most important thing for people that are suffering from depression should know is that they are not alone. There is always someone to talk to wether it be your family, friends, co-workers, pets, and experts who will know exactly how to help you. So I decided to make my slogan “You don’t have to be alone in the fight against depression.” This week my class went on a field trip to UCSD Hillcrest CARE. They set up a series of workshops for us that were very informational. The first one I went to they showed us a machine called EEG or an electroencephalogram. They hooked it up to one of my peers and showed us how it measures and charts muscle movement. Next we learned more about the CARE program and its purpose along with what they have accomplished. After that they gave us a presentation on neuropsychological testing and a little activity that went with it. The activity they had me do was read off a paper, sounds easy right? Wrong. It started off just reading colors off a paper that were in black ink. The next paper I read the names of the colors and the ink they were printed in were corresponding and that made it really easy. After that they gave me a paper where the names of the colors and the ink they were written in was all scrambled. That was very difficult for me, I kept stuttering and reading the color instead of saying the ink it was printed in. It took me over one minute and I didn’t even finish all the words on the paper. On the other papers that I read it only took me about forty seconds. It really surprised me that just by changing the colors of the words it makes it harder to say the color instead of read the word. During this week my class took a field trip to UCSD in La Jolla and we were given a very long lecture about the adolescent brain by Dr. Jay Geibb. From his lecture I learned that the adolescent brain is able to easily learn new skills and accept the rapid change that is constantly happening all around us. Also I found out that an average American spends 11 hours on a screen a day, that is so much time, it is so hard for me to believe even as I am typing this right now. Another thing that Dr. Geibb mentioned is that at birth the branches of neurons in your brain are minimal then around the age of six your body overproduces these cells then around the age of fourteen the brain has gotten rid of the excess cells but still has more than it did at birth. Next we went to the lab and got to go through three different workshops. The first workshop they had for us was cutting mice brains and putting them on the glass for the microscope. Then we went to the next workshop which was my favorite where we got to look at kisspeptin in the brain of a mouse this one was my favorite because we had to look at two different brains and try to figure out if it was male or female and if it was female had it gone through puberty yet. I liked how they gave us the chance to take in information then apply it to something. The next lab we went to we had to take a sample of food coloring (represented DNA sample) and put it in a gel mold then send electricity through it and after that put it in a box to test the DNA. This week we had guest speakers that came to the class and talk about the brain and how it functions. But I was very sick all week so I missed every day of school that week. It was hard to stay at home while I knew that so much was going on at school and that I was missing all of it. While I was at home I did have to read a book about depression called The Depression Cure for my biology class and I think I learned a lot from that. In the book it talks a lot about the ways to treat depression without taking medication. One of the big things that is mentioned is “Therapeutic Lifestyle Change (TLC)”. They just talk about how it is very important to make sure that you are spending enough time outdoors and getting the fats you need, like omega-3. Another thing they talk about is the way depression in our culture has increased compared to the hunter-gatherer culture. In the hunter-gatherer culture the number of people who are depressed is significantly lower than the number of people in our current culture. That really stood out to me because in the book it also said that the hunter-gatherers should be more depressed due to all the trauma that they deal with compared to the U.S. culture where we have everything that could make our lives easy and happy and yet we still have higher numbers of depression.So far I’m really enjoying the book and I can’t wait to finish it. |
AuthorMy name is Sofianna Sanchez and I'm a junior at High Tech High Chula Vista. I'm wrote these blog posts weekly to help me prepare for writing them daily during my month long internship. Archives
June 2017
Categories |