A look inside the typical day of second-year HDFS major Amulya Aradhyula.
Name: Amulya Aradhyula
Year: 2nd
Hometown: Austin
Major: Human Development and Family Sciences (HDFS); Business Foundations
8:00 AM
Amulya wakes up and prepares for her day in her dorm, Andrews.
9:00 AM
She heads over to the first class of the day in Gearing Hall, Family Resource Management with associate professor Karrol Kitt. She’s really interested in the class because it gives a completely new perspective on a subject that she thought she already knew. She hasn’t chosen a concentration within HDF yet and keeps changing her mind, but for now she’s leaning toward the Families and Personal Relationships track. It combines psychology and neuroscience and is an up-and-coming field.
10:30 AM
Next, it’s off to the Lab. Amulya has been working in the Schnyer Lab, a learning and memory lab, since September. She’s currently working under a grad student and studying the relationship between sleep and memory loss in elder adults. They’re still in the pilot phase of the study. They ran it with undergrads last semester and today she is preparing to run it on older adults.
12:30 PM
After grabbing a quick bite to eat, Amulya heads over to the Imaging Research Center where she gets to work with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). She’s using the fMRI scanner to perform brain scans on patients for her research lab. As a freshman Amulya had to take a basic research methods class that is very similar to the one that biology and chemistry majors take. After her work in the Schnyer lab last semester she gained level one fMRI certification, and hopefully by the end of this semester she should be level two certified and get to run scans on her own. She’s really excited about this study as it could have implications for how we understand and treat Alzheimer’s disease.
3:30 PM
Legal Environment of Business is Amulya’s last class of the day. She enjoys her business foundation classes and eventually would like to have a job that combines HDF and business.
6:30 PM
After a good workout, she meets her friends for dinner. It has been a busy day and Amulya finally gets the time to sit back and relax. They start talking about one of their favorite shows, How I Met Your Mother.
9:00 PM
It’s time to finish up some studying for tomorrow’s exam in Finance. She meets some of her classmates at the FAC, her favorite study spot on campus.
12:00 AM
Amulya makes her way to her room to get some much needed sleep. Tomorrow is going to be another busy day.
By Prachi Patel, Natural Sciences Council
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