The Tuftonian Dream: For the love of the brain

When you were young, you maybe had a dream. You were going to fly to the moon, pass EC 5, cure cancer. Then, you grew up. You cut your hair, chose your major, changed your outlook. You changed a lot, but did you change your dream?

Junior Christine Barthelemy used to have free time. Back in middle school, she ran track, perused her mother’s medical books and tracked down every YouTube video she could find of people puncturing their bulging pustules. She smiles and states, “I thought pimple-popping videos were cool before they were cool.” She continues, “As a middle-schooler, I was always on YouTube looking at weird skin disorders. Because I was one of the ... ‘smart kids,’ I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be a doctor. Obviously, it’s gonna work out.’”

In order to make her dream work out, Christine stopped working out. The aspiring dermatologist wanted to feel like she had more skin in the game, so in high school, she invested herself in her studies. She says, “I stopped playing sports because I wanted to focus on school … I became a nerd who only hung out with other nerds and took a bunch of hard classes.”

Eventually, Christine’s dedication in those classes propelled her to Tufts, where she no longer oozes excitement over those strangely satisfying cyst-bursting videos. She puns, “They became so popular that they just popped up on my Facebook all the time.” Christine entered Tufts as a biology major, but her interest in dermatology was already waning by the time she took Introduction to Psychology during her sophomore fall. She comments, “When we got to the section about brain anatomy, it lit up my life … I became more interested in psychology and the brain and less interested in going to medical school.”

With that epiphany, Christine dropped her chemistry class, and a weight dropped from her shoulders. At this point, she intends to pursue a doctoral degree in neuroscience. Christine explains, “I really love the brain,” and she really loves her grandmother, too. She shares, “My grandmother has Alzheimer’s, and we’re very close. She’s getting worse, so I’m seeing it firsthand.” For that reason, in her most shining vision for the future, Christine is “a successful researcher who has somehow discovered a very helpful treatment in the delay of dementia.”

The delay of dementia in everybody, that is. As the black daughter of two Haitian immigrants, issues of race and gender play prominent roles in Christine’s life, and she asserts, “I can’t be a proper scientist if I don’t think about these things specifically, because they relate to me personally.” At Tufts, Christine tackles those topics as a research assistant in the Diversity and Intergroup Relations psychology lab, where she is learning skills that will transfer to the clinical experiments that she hopes to conduct later in life.

Long ago, Christine spent her free time watching people pop their pimples, but now, she researches Alzheimer’s disease, which is exactly what she dreams of doing for a long time to come. She concludes, “You may think one little passion can’t be a career, but it can.”