As a person who came from a society that values illusions more than reality, and ignorance more than knowledge, my goal, in general, is to get myself away from fantasies, imaginations, and abstract ideas to focus on statistical facts and proven theories. Knowing that the current most conflicted field, which people still perceive as unreal is psychology, I decided to take the challenge to discover what is it about this field that is making people view it as mysterious or unworthy.

In Yemen, the country that I came from, people still believe that a person who has a psychological problem is possessed with an evil spirit. A lot of people in the community suffer from mental issues, yet they refuse to see a doctor, believing that reading the Quran will solve the problem, even though none have recovered. Not only that but also, people who do not depend on the religious texts, for them, it’s a shame to be psychologically ill.

While observing the situation I came to a guess that it may be the lack of representatives in the field of psychology around the public that is causing people to view psychology as non-real. The fact that they do not know much about it makes it something that is insufficient to be considered as a real issue. For that reason, the main achievement that has been motivating me since I was in high school is to create a program that focuses on facilitating and spreading psychological information to the public, especially to the societies that have high ignorance rates, as these societies suffer more.

With this goal in mind, learning how to communicate scientific papers to a verity of an audience is essential to my goal. Especially that I am a second language speaker, and reading scientific texts, currently, is overwhelming. However, I understand that since psychology and neuroscience are going to be my main focus in the upcoming years, I will encounter many difficult papers that I would have to read and analysis. Besides I want the passion and excitement, that I believe I possess in these fields to stay high. Whereas, I do not want to let the complex papers and assignments destroy these feelings, as it is the only thing that is keeping me unyielding to work vigorously. 

After pursuing my undergrad in City College and to be able to have as many sufficient information as possible to share with the public, my next step would be grad school. Not only that but attempting to communicate with people who are already in the field is as important as studying it. I would like to learn how to communicate with the experts to be able to learn from them as well as get exposed to experiences that could get me to learn a lot in a short time.

With all of that in mind, learning how to communicate scientific materials verbally, through debates and thoughts exchange, as well as by reading, analyzing and writing are all needed skills that I hope I will be able to attain to by the end of this semester.

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