neuronerd

I am almost finished my first year of university! I started my 3rd week of neuroscience today, which is my second last block of the year. So far the term has been super interesting - maybe just because I'm a huge bionerd, but I love learning about the body. Although I was amazed by the brain before I studied neuroscience, this class has really made me appreciate the complexity of the squishy pink organ that floats around in my skull like highschool never could. I like the way the course is organized because in addition to learning about the intricacies of the brain in class - we get to design our own experiments and use other students as test subjects...dun dun dun. Although we don't get to use scalpels, we still get to participate in experiments that physically demonstrate how the brain processes visual images or sound for example. For my visual experiment last week, my group and I used what's called "the waterfall illusion" to test if complex cells (which are cells that are responsible for processing moving images) are affected by long-term caffeine use. You can see the illusion for yourself here. It's pretty intense though - and as experimentation went on, we started to refer to the effects of the illusion as free drugs hahah. So be warned.

Here is a picture of our experimentation -

and this is my neuroscience class on a field trip to the SFU library to do research on our final paper.

The field trip was actually the most endearing thing - because we all filed off the bus, and immediately got overwhelmed by the cold, grey concrete of SFU. We felt so small and lost and we were immediately struck with the fact that no one at the university acknowledged eachother. It felt like wandering in a mall or in a big city. It felt so anonymous. I'm pretty sure everyone appreciated Quest the moment that our bus pulled into the parking lot - because all we could talk about throughout the three hours we spent on the SFU campus was how much we wanted to go back to our little university on the hill. My friend Alana summarized our feelings the best: "Even though Quest is a small school, in some ways, it's bigger than a university like SFU. Schools like SFU may have more students, but at Quest, you know more students."
I definitely came back from the trip with a little more appreciation for Quest, and I came to the conclusion that I am so happy to go to a small school instead of a mall- sized-mammoth university. Hallelujah!


stay tuned for updates about the upcoming residence and student council elections which will be happening over the next couple of weeks!

love,
caro

The Juan da Fuca Adventure

At five in the morning a few days after school got out for Spring Break last week, some of my closest friends and I piled into a van and started out for the Juan de Fuca trail on Vancouver Island. We could hardly all fit considering the size of our backpacks (I'm pretty sure I would have been able to fit inside my bag), but we listened to John Mayer pretty much all the way there which made the journey to the trail cramped but tolerable. When we set sail on the ferry to the island we were lucky enough to see the sunrise, but the closer we got to the trail head, the more nervous I got. Considering that I had never even been on an overnight hike before, I really didn't think I would be able to handle 4 nights and 5 days - but there was no going back. When Jenn Segger-Gigg (one of the atheletic directors at Quest) dropped us off and drove away with the van, we were finally on our own and into the wild.

The Juan de Fuca is a 47 km trail located on the western coast of Vancouver Island beneath the West Coast trail. It's pretty rugged, and it hugs the coast line while weaving in and out of dense forest. We hit the trail super early into the season and managed to miss the wettest part of spring, but the trail was still soaked and muddy. Although we avoided crowds of hikers by going so early, we couldn't avoid being just as soaked and muddy as the trail. We waded through trenches of mud, hopped from tree stump to tree stump and gingerly crept across logs. But despite our best attempts to step as carefully as possible, we still spent the majority of the trip with soggy socks and mud caked clothes because we slipped and fell so much. I was even christianed with the nickname "Autumn" because of my falling record (I still have bruises as a testament to this!) 47 km doesn't sound like that far of a distance, but the terrain was rough and the hills of the trail were gruelling - which made doing even 7 km a day long affair. But even though our muscles complained, it was so rewarding to emerge from the forest to catch a glimpse of the open ocean.

We even got to sleep by the sea! For two out of the four nights, we were lucky enough to set up camp on beaches (and it didn't rain!) The first was on Sombrio beach which is a huge surfing hangout - so we got to sit by the fire and watch the last surfers of the night weaving through the waves as the sun set. Pretty romantic. The second beach sleep was a little more exciting however. We had stumbled off the trail after 10 hours and 19 km of the hardest segment (the 11 hills of death) to collapse on the sandy shore of Mystic Beach, and we quickly set up camp without checking our tide table like we had been doing throughout the journey. We were just too tired to care about anything besides sleeping and dinner and we hastily pitched our tents on ground that looked pretty safe. Bad call. We woke up at 1 in the morning with the sound of the tide roaring in our ears, and we peaked outside the tents to see the waves crashing about 3 meters away. We went into panic mode and everyone climbed groggily out of our sleeping bags and dragged the tents further upshore. Somehow in the total darkness and in bare feet we managed to hoist the tents over heaps on driftwood - which was well worth it considering that the next morning, all the footprints we had made the night before had been washed away by the ocean. But we survived!

Despite close calls, long days and lack of sanitation, the Juan de Fuca was nothing short of amazing. I learned so much about working together, and I really appreciated being envelopped in the wilderness with some of the most hardworking, clever and supportive people in my life.

I left for the trail without any hiking experience and came back dirty, bruised and with amazing memories of my first spring break at Quest.

This is the crew pre-Fuca when we were clean and dry

We stopped for lunch on the beach and ate in a cave!

We had to climb across so many logs over ravines and raging rivers.

Forest gymnastics - the balance beam

Anything you eat on trail tastes amazing