A Beautiful Mindset

CAMBRIDGE—Last Sunday morning, my alarm went off at 8 a.m. Without thinking twice, I sprang out of bed, turned the alarm off and plugged in the electric kettle to make instant coffee. In five minutes, I was (slightly) buzzed, a little disoriented and very excited. Was this momentary insanity, or even the result of a bad nightmare?

Any other sensible twenty-year-old would have been blissfully unaware of anything going on so early on a Sunday morning in the middle of July, but I was pumped up and ready to start my day. In one hour (drumroll, please), I was going to interview Gerald Sarwer-Foner, a retired psychiatrist from Detroit.

The fact that my 9 a.m. plans meant little to anyone else made them all the more special to me. Sarwer-Foner was going to be my third interviewee for my senior thesis—a relatively obscure physician for a relatively obscure topic: the history of insulin coma therapy for schizophrenia. If that doesn’t ring a bell, Russell Crowe convulsing violently through the window of Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital, as a pained Jennifer Connelly looks on, probably does. John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind, received the now-defunct therapy for schizophrenia. (Incidentally, convulsions only occurred in about ten percent of patients.)

In the remaining 40 minutes, I had to set up my dictaphone, make sure the speakerphone on my telephone was working, prepare a list of questions and re-read some comments Dr. Sarwer-Foner had made at a 1958 conference on the use of insulin in psychiatry. As I prepared, I felt the adrenaline rush that came with knowing I was completely steeped in academia.

The rush has come before, and its timing has always neatly coincided with school vacations—over Thanksgiving, when the facts and figures from my recent frenetic research at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library somehow make peace with one another and congeal in a thrilling, argumentative whole, or over intersession, when a stroll through Barnes and Noble becomes an opportunity to take advantage of the fully-credited parental units on the other side of the store so that one magazine morphs into fifteen new books, all of which must absolutely be read, that week.

That voracity for knowledge is a feeling I have been rediscovering every day this summer, as I inch along on thesis research. A project that I began early—mostly out of fear—has quickly become the centerpiece of my summer, an opportunity to investigate the topic I like best at a pace of my own choosing. Deadlines now hidden away on syllabi in last year’s binders, I create my own schedule, deciding which books I will read and when.

As I commute across town for work every day, I protectively clutch my latest book as the bus rattles me back and forth. Still, an almost strange and funny sense of purposefulness persists, even if I’m only one page further by the time I arrive. I am beginning to master a tiny piece of knowledge, beginning to become an expert on an obscure little piece of academia, and the freedom of summer has paradoxically given me the drive and self-control to move forward.

I don’t think it’s just me. As I speak with friends, scattered around the country to explore their own tiny corners of the universe, we all seem to have carved out for ourselves a small niche we can call our own, and to be avidly embracing it each day with the freedom and zing that it seems only summer can provide. While we may not be turning in weekly response papers or attending sections, we somehow seem to be working harder and more passionately, and discovering more about ourselves in the process.

When September arrives, it will bring with it the incessant scheduling, listing, and other daily drudgery of the school year. But when I hand in my study card this year, I hope it won’t symbolize the beginning of nine months of predictability and struggles to meet deadlines. Maybe it will be the beginning of a new kind of school year—one in which learning about myself and embracing academic passion aren’t put on the back burner, but are instead allowed to flourish in all their silliness and sincerity: nine months of July.

Deborah B. Doroshow ’04, a Crimson editor, is a history and science concentrator in Mather House. She and her library books would like to thank the owners of the M2 shuttles for investing in new buses that don’t rattle around quite as much.