Hey, I am Mackenzie Sloan. I am a sophomore, health sciences major. I am from McCalla, Al. It's about 30 minutes from here. I plan to become a nurse and work for a bit and eventually become a nurse practitioner. This January I did an internship at UAB Hospital where I shadowed nurse practitioners and physicians assistants. It was really cool to be able to see what it is like working in a hospital and interacting with patietns. I am really interested in psychiatric medicine, but we will see if that stays the same. I am interested in psych because I feel like I would never be bored, and it's cool to me that we hall have the same organs and brain structure yet some peoples develop and respond differently. What I want to learn from this class is how genes play a role in our mental health. That could be any mental disorders, or even Alzheimers and dementia. So I have played softball since I was three, and I was supposed to play here at BSC but decided not to because I wanted a break from ball. Now I cheer here and I haven't cheered since elementary school. Totally different than what I am used to, but I enjoy it. If money and time were no object, I would probably go on an Alaskan cruise. I love cold weather and I think it would be really cool to be on a ship for a long time and see the sea creatures along the way.
Hey Mackenzie! I think psychiatry and brain structure is fascinating too. I had never given much thought to it before, but last semester I took a class with Dr. Grall in the music department, and we focused on how individuals can have different responses to the same music pieces based on small differences in their brains. That was a really interesting class because we were able to look into a lot of different case studies and investigate how one person's perception of music can alter their mental state. It was cool how you mentioned neural development too because we studied how infants have an innate neural response to music even though some scholars argue that we have no predisposition to musical skills.
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