Lauren Burakowski gathers with the other student attendees in anticipation of the awards announcements at Carnegie Mellon's Meeting of the Minds undergraduate research symposium. She's not sure how she has fared, but after the hectic schedule of the day, the awards presentation is welcome and surprisingly entertaining. She laughs along with the others at the event when the winners of the Johnson & Johnson Competition are whimsically presented with bottles of baby shampoo with their awards, a placeholder for the prize money that will come later. Burakowski applauds and giggles to a friend, "I want a shampoo bottle!"
The late afternoon laughter is a release from her earlier nerves. She was required to present a talk on her psychology senior honors thesis: Examining Preservation in 3-Year-Olds Using the Go/No-Go Task. Burakowski had practiced for days, pacing over what she would say, how she could condense this 28-page paper into a 10-minute lecture. She even tried to anticipate questions from the audience.
When her moment came, she could hear the confidence gather in her voice as she spoke on this topic she knows and loves so well. She even happily fielded questions. This, she thought, was her milieu. When her presentation ended, she gave a silent thanks to her psychology professor advisors—Anna Fisher and Kenneth Kotovsky—for preparing her so well to handle the pressure of her first professional talk.
In fact, Burakowski warmly credits Kotovsky, who was also her freshman advisor, with sharpening her academic interest in psychology in the first place. As a freshman, she had been unsure of what to study. She thought of majoring in physics, but it was Kotovsky who helped her realize how much she "enjoys" studying developmental psychology in children—studies she will pursue in graduate school at UCLA. The symposium has given her a chance to showcase what she's learned at Carnegie Mellon. It feels to her like the pinnacle of her undergraduate days.
Validation of that feeling is about to come. Kotovsky announces the symposium award for the psychology department. Burakowski is shocked to hear from her collegiate mentor the first public accolade of her career.
—Elizabeth O'Brien
