I attended a portion of the Research Internship Day held in the
Baylor Sciences Building last Friday, November 18th. Unfortunately, my
schedule permitted me to attend only Mericyn and Rachel's breakout session
about their work with Dr. Scullin in the sleep lab, held directly before Dr.
Scullin's main presentation.
Mericyn and Rachel
provided an overview of the study performed in the lab last year with interior
design students, the same study that Dr. Scullin explained in class. The
study used personal diary-like self-report measures as well as actigraphy to
observe the effects of total sleep time and sleep patterns on creativity in
interior design students. The study's "punch-line," or
take-home-message, can be described by the following directional statement:
Get more sleep,
better yet more consistent sleep, if you want to think
creatively and effectively.
The students also
briefly highlighted their study currently underway involving the effects of
sleep (i.e. sleep loss or poor sleep quality) on efficient cognitive processing
-- specifically, the cognitive skills needed to solve economics problems on
assessments. This study struck me as one that I think will shed a lot of
light on the effects of sleep health [deprivation] on academic performance.
As a sleep-deprived Baylor undergraduate, pursuing a challenging major, I
look forward to hearing about this study's findings and implications for my
academic success.
Additionally, I
found Dr. Scullin’s lecture about discovering and pursuing your academic (then
career) passion to be very informative and enlightening. The insight he provided I think will prove to
be useful for all those in attendance. Therefore,
I will discuss his main points here in an effort to provide the general public
with some of the same helpful guidance:
Firstly, to successfully discover and know your career calling,
one must adhere to two principles:
1) You
must find a great mentor.
a. Someone who will build you up but
challenge you
b. Someone who cares deeply for your success
c. Someone with whom you can be vulnerable
and vice versa
2) You must dream big, fail often, and
persevere.
a. You must dream outside-of-the-box; and
when your ideas are shot down, the critiques you receive must not deter you
from your ambitions but inspire you to be better.
b. You must respond to every piece of
negative feedback you receive and improve your idea based on that feedback.
c. And then you must never give up but rather
continue to persevere until you reach your goals – and then continue learning!
When discussing these steps, Dr. Scullin explained, for example,
how studying prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future) lead
him to study sleep and memory consolidation – sleep science being his true
passion. He also met his wife in the
first lab he where he worked, a place for developing later academic
pursuits. Hence, he was able to complete
the impossible task of weaving his career passions and academic pursuits (i.e. “work
life”) with his “personal life” (love, marriage, friendship). In other words, Dr. Scullin found work-life co-inherence rather than work-life
balance: the much more complicated but rewarding avenue to take.
This way, when one lets his/ her work inform life decisions and
practices, and conversely allows life experience to inform work [they are
integrated], he/ she can find a lot more value in both than if they had to
remain ‘separate but equal’.
I enjoyed hearing Dr. Scullin’s thoughts as I am willing to
consider any advice that will inform my quality of life in the very demanding
and busy healthcare career field. Still
a rewarding professional pursuit, I look forward to serving others in
healthcare and hope that my love for people will inform my service to their
well-being.
Lastly, I have been coming to learn that I cannot serve others
well if I am firstly not whole. So, I am
glad to say that my sleep habits have been steadily improving! I have been going to bed and waking up at
roughly the same times every night/morning…even though I am still averaging
less than 7.5 hours of sleep daily, I am taking baby steps to improve my sleep
health!
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