About
I study literature and the brain. They keep overlapping.
(real photo pending)
I’m Sarah — a double major in English and Psychology at UNC Chapel Hill, which is a polite way of saying I read for a living and intend to keep doing it. I grew up believing books were a kind of magic trick; college taught me the trick has neurons. These days you’ll find me on the eighth floor of Davis Library with a stack of novels, one psych textbook, and a pen I will absolutely lose by Thursday.
the pen is already lost. it’s always already lost.People often ask which major is the real one. Honestly, they’re the same class taught in different buildings. English trains me to sit with a sentence until it gives something up; psychology asks what a mind was doing when it made that sentence in the first place. Attention, memory, the small stories we tell to make our days hold together — I get to study them twice, once through novels and once through experiments, and each version keeps the other honest.
same class, different buildings — eleven minutes apart, past the Old Well.The plan
After Chapel Hill, the plan is medical school, and eventually psychiatry — the corner of medicine where listening is the primary instrument, and where a person’s story isn’t background to the chart so much as the point of it. I want to be a doctor who takes sentences and symptoms equally seriously. Until then: labs, office hours, late-night dorm debates about consciousness, and more flashcards than any reasonable person needs. Carolina rain optional, but statistically likely.
Field notes
- Best study spot: Davis Library, eighth floor, window seat, thunderstorm preferred.
- Comfort reread: Middlemarch. Yes, all of it. Annually.
- Semicolons are load-bearing; I will not be elaborating.
- I name my flashcard decks. The neurotransmitters are called “the gossip.”
- Can be bribed with new pens and Cook Out milkshakes.
- I annotate in pencil and erase every mark before returning library books.
Currently
- ReadingOliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat — slowly, with a pencil.
- Studying forthe psych/soc section of the MCAT, a.k.a. home-field advantage.
- Draftingan essay on marginalia and memory, working title “In Defense of Underlining.”
- Drinking too muchEarl Grey with milk. The library café knows my order, which is either charming or a warning.