F1RST P0ST!!!

Welcome to the Dendritic Arbor! I'm Kelly, aka Alioth, currently a (relatively) bright-eyed and bushy-tailed freshman at MIT. I'm interested in all sorts of fields, primarily the ones you see in the blog description. I haven't declared a major yet, but I know I want to go on to grad school and then academic research, and I have a fairly good idea of what sort of research I want to do. So at the moment I'm debating whether to officially major in Bioengineering, Brain&Cognitive Sciences, or (most likely) some combination of the two.

And why, you ask, am I blogging? There are several reasons: an excuse to procrastinate, because it's neat to be able to subscribe to my own RSS feed, because I think it's deplorable that there isn't already a blog called "The Dendritic Arbor", because I read so many blogs that I'm starting to think this blogging lark is something I can actually do (ha)...lots of bad reasons.

But what's the good reason? I've been maintaining a LiveJournal since early in high school, so I have some little experience at blogging. It's pretty thorough, but the vast majority of the content is just me blathering about my personal life, which is not at all interesting to people who don't know me. Occasionally, though, I've made a post that I thought was really worth reading. Perhaps this is arrogant, but I've even regretted that those posts get little traffic, and have guilt-by-association with LiveJournal, the forum of stereotypical pretentious emo teenagers. I like to think I grew out of that when I graduated high school, lo these many months ago.

On top of that, my daily readings page is largely populated by the good folk over at ScienceBlogs. I greatly admire their work, and for a while now I've had an urge to emulate them. Of course, I'm just a first-term undergrad and I naturally don't expect to do nearly as well as grad students, full tenured professors, and big shots from PLoS. We'll see what comes of this little venture of mine.