Devanshi Trivedi ’22 of Rajkot, India, has wanted to study the brain ever since third grade, when a friend told her that our eyes see the world upside down, but our brains flip everything right side up. 

Trivedi never lost sight of her interest in learning how the brain works. At �ֲ���ý, she deepened that interest, delving into studies that seek to understand “what makes us who we are,” earning a major in neuroscience and a minor in philosophy.

Trivedi recalls taking her first neuroscience course and thinking, “I have a favorite professor at �ֲ���ý.” Then she took another neuroscience course — and discovered another new favorite professor. It happened enough, she laughs, that her friends would say, “Not again!”

“Every professor in neuroscience has just approached the work in so many different ways,” she says. “That’s been one of the best parts of my experience.”

Trivedi got to know her senior thesis adviser, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene, as a summer research assistant in Greene’s lab after her first year. Being advised by Greene for her thesis is a nice bookend to her �ֲ���ý career. “Hers was the first lab I ever worked in.”

As Trivedi moved from first year to senior year, she went from being a learner of neuroscience knowledge and research methods to a more active collaborator with Greene through her thesis research.

“I started to have a say in the design elements of my experiments,” she says. “We think together about how we want to analyze the results or what kinds of further work we could do.”

Her neuroscience thesis explores the capacity limits of visual memory, and the curious psychological phenomena of “boundary extension” and “boundary contraction.” The former describes how, after we observe an image and then recall it from memory, we tend to zoom out, recalling details that weren’t actually in the image.

Boundary contraction is where our memories crop an image, recalling fewer details as we remember it. It’s a more recently studied phenomenon. “We believe it is related to the amount of information within an image,” Trivedi says. “Our visual memory may be capacity-limited by the amount of information in images.”

While Trevedi arrived at �ֲ���ý with a keen interest in studying the science of the brain, only later did she discover an interest in an humanistic approach, through her minor, philosophy.

“I’ve always loved thinking about the mind and the brain and how those two sort of coexist,” she says. “How does the brain really create a person? That was something that I’ve been able to explore more through the philosophy side of things: How can an organ — that is just matter — create something that is conscious or that is human?”

Whether it’s neuroscience and philosophy, or any other juxtaposition of academic interests, the effect is to “broaden the scope of whatever you thought your field was. And that just gives you so much perspective.”

For Noah Pott ’22, what started as a fun way to kill time in the summer before seventh grade — by acting in a community production of the musical Oliver! — culminated in a proud but terrifying moment on the stage of Schaeffer Theatre on a recent evening in March.

The occasion was the March 3 premiere of 35mm: A Musical Exhibition, which Pott directed as part of his senior thesis in theater and music. A one-man band of sorts, he not only directed the show but also conducted a live orchestra — Pott is also a music major — and played keyboard and accordion.

In the heart-pounding moments before the curtain was drawn, Pott recalls thinking how “this is real, this is the night, this is when we have an audience. There are real stakes here.

“My heart was racing, for sure.”

But then the magic of theater took over. “I remember a moment, maybe after the first or second song, where I just started sitting back playing the piano on stage and conducting.”

Pott’s experience with 35mm typifies what he discovered during his studies at �ֲ���ý: a performance community that thrives on collaboration, which in turn opens the doors to all sorts of possibilities for storytelling that showcase a variety of skills.

The play features a series of vignettes in which actors perform songs in front of projected photographs by New York City artist Matthew Murphy with music and lyrics by his husband, Ryan Scott Oliver.

The play “looks at how photographs inspire the stories that are told on stage,” explains Pott. “That’s not often been done in the musical theater canon by any means.”

35mm shows that there are “myriad possibilities” in how theater can tell stories, he says. It’s about “marrying theater, marrying dance and movement and acting and all of these different aspects — and tech design and production — to tell these stories.”

As a director, Pott found that he thrived in the collision of ideas that arise as a production is envisioned and executed.

“One of my favorite parts is just listening,” he says, “listening to others and hearing other people’s opinions. I’m very much about just listening to other people and collaborating on pretty much every single aspect of the production.”

Pott describes the coming together of his two creative worlds, theater and music, as a kind of romance. This “newer love,” as he calls it, started blooming when he joined the Deansmen a capella group in his first year at �ֲ���ý, moving into the role of music director his sophomore year. He calls the job as creating “a balance between voices in the group and also creating a collaborative atmosphere. I just absolutely loved it.”

Complementing his two majors, Pott is pursuing a general education concentration in urban studies, and during his time studying abroad in Copenhagen did urban studies and design coursework.

What does urban studies have to do with performance?

Well, “cities and performing arts are inextricably connected— where there are cities, there are people, and the arts are the lifeblood of people,” says Pott. “Whether I go into urban planning or design, or the performing arts beyond �ֲ���ý, both of these passions will naturally feed each other, with the goal of creating a better, more sustainable, and more humane world.”

What Pott will take away from �ֲ���ý is the ability to achieve excellence “in many different things — and continue to do all of those things after �ֲ���ý as well. Whether it’s music, or music direction, environmental studies, or all of the above.”

One day, the little girl announced to her kindergarten teacher, “I want to be an entomologist!” While her classmates dreamed of becoming princesses, dragons, and firefighters, Essie Martin ’22 already knew what she wanted to do: study the natural world.

Martin was raised in the coastal Maine town of Damariscotta. As she grew up, so grew her love of the ocean and her community, as well as her understanding of how coastal communities depend on the marine economy. 

“Since a young age, I’ve always wanted to sort of work with oceans and help oceans,” she says.

But at the same time, she’s also had a front-row seat to the effects of climate change. “I’ve seen climate change in action in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise if I had grown up somewhere else,” she says. 

“There’s the side of me that really hopes that kelp is contributing to climate mitigation and the oceans can be a solution to all this, and then there’s the science hat that I put on in the lab.”

At �ֲ���ý, Martin is putting her advocacy into informed action. She’s majoring in geology and minoring in chemistry, and her senior honors thesis is studying the ability of kelp to sequester carbon, a popular rallying point of climate activists encouraging investment in ocean health. 

Kelp absorbs carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and then sinks to the ocean floor like leaves in a forest, eventually becoming part of the ocean floor, holding onto the captured carbon for — hopefully — millions of years.

“There’s a lot of media hype about kelp and its ability to sequester carbon, but actually there’s very little scientific evidence to back that up,” says Martin.

By collecting sediment samples from the sediment below seaweed farms located on the coastal Damariscotta River and studying them in the lab, Martin can see if there’s any presence of or carbon isotopes in the sediment, which could indicate carbon sequestration.

To identify carbon and nitrogen isotopes, Martin uses a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer in the Environmental Geochemistry Laboratory at �ֲ���ý. For the eDNA analysis, she was able to access new and important eDNA technology being developed at Maine’s internationally known Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences by . In the Price lab, doctoral student Sam Tan is helping to analyze Martin’s samples.

Martin explains that her honors thesis is part of a “preliminary study to just see if there’s kelp in the sediment at all. After that, there’s going to be a lot more work that needs to be done. And that could be a future project for me in grad school or beyond.”

“There’s a lot of media hype about kelp and its ability to sequester carbon, but actually there’s very little scientific evidence to back that up.”

For Martin, “grad school or beyond” will receive funding from a highly competitive Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which will help her pursue a master’s degree in aquaculture and policy. Martin hopes to follow that with a doctorate in geochemical oceanography. 

The Truman Scholarship recognizes individuals who show leadership potential and are committed to public service, traditionally defined by land-locked efforts around social justice. With climate change knocking on earth’s door, Martin appreciates that “an important element of public service now is our oceans and our fisheries and aquaculture.”

Martin’s fieldwork has been through internships with the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, in Walpole, Maine, .

“I found that my favorite part of the job were days when I got to go out on the farm and either helped do some of the work or drive the boats around. I just love getting my hands dirty with it,” says Martin. 

“I have always been the muddiest kid on the playground and my mom used to get really upset at me for it. My coworkers still make fun of me today. I’ll come back to the lab and I’ll just be drenched in mud head to toe.”

But getting her hands deep in mud and seaweed is one of the things that makes her the happiest, even if it’s cold.

“I’ll come back to the lab and I’ll just be drenched in mud head to toe.”

During her time at �ֲ���ý, Martin’s approach to environmental advocacy has matured. From simple ideas like pulling plastics from the ocean to finding long-term sustainable ways to utilize existing aquaculture resources, she’s figuring out how to be a scientist-activist.

“I feel like I’ve had to create two hats for myself,” says Martin. “There’s the side of me that really hopes that kelp is contributing to climate mitigation and the oceans can be a solution and all this, and then there’s the science hat that I put on in the lab.”

When she’s in the lab, Martin puts the science hat on. “I just plug my music in and I do the lab work. I don’t really think about the intention when I’m in the lab.”

It’s not easy, she says. “I know that this is something that a lot of scientists go through learning, and I’m still very much in that process. Working through those emotions is really important.”

Help and guidance comes from mentors like Martin’s thesis advisor, Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Bev Johnson, and the Darling Marine Center’s Damien Brady.

Alternating between the lab and the field showed Martin the push-and-pull of aquaculture academics and industry, and she wants to foster that partnership, especially since a large part of the economic life of the Maine coast is drawn from the ocean.

“In Maine, there’s traditionally been sort of some bad blood between industry — particularly the lobstering industry and scientists — because there’s this idea that science is always regulating the lobster industry, which is true,” she says. “I would like to be a scientist who is informing that policy and looking at how to — particularly with aquaculture, because it’s such a new industry — keep it green, and keep it sustainable as a long-term industry.”

Early last fall, Maya Benziger ’22 and her fellow Merimanders were talking about plans to return to the stage after a long pandemic absence. What started as a simple discussion about songs and setlists became an existential moment.

“We asked, ‘Okay, well, what is our setlist?” And then, “How did we used to do this? What were our traditions?’”

Like college a cappella groups around the country, the Merimanders hadn’t performed publicly since March 2020. Since then, two classes had graduated, stripping the ensemble of its institutional memory.

“I realized that I was one of the few people in the group who actually knew — and I realized I didn’t want that to end with me,” said Benziger. 

At that moment, recalls Benziger, “it wasn’t going to suffice for me to just be another singer in the choir. It was important to step up and become one of the leaders.”

Like many of her classmates, Benziger — now co-president of the Merimanders — has experienced key moments in her �ֲ���ý experience, where her growing knowledge and self-awareness put her on a springboard, from which she jumped into action and leadership. 

Taking on a leadership role was not something she would have predicted at the beginning of her college career. “I don’t think ‘timid’ is the right word,” said Benziger, “but I think I was somebody who was sort of hesitant to go the full nine yards.”

“What if I fail?” she would ask herself. “What if it’s too much work? What if I can’t do it?”

She came face-to-face with that hesitation when she started working at a Lewiston nonprofit, the Center for Wisdom’s Women. Benziger had reached out to Marty Deschaines ’75 of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, looking for student employment. 

Deschaines, the Harward center’s assistant director of community volunteerism and student leadership development, suggested Wisdom’s Women, and the next day, Benziger walked over to the center — and was overwhelmed. 

“There were just a lot of people,” said Benziger. “You walk in and there’s 20, 30 women, and everyone’s having conversations. Back before the pandemic, there’d be people in the kitchen cooking, other people would be doing an art class, or chatting over coffee.”

The hubbub of the center intimidated Benziger at first but she decided to keep showing up. “It just became like almost a home away from home. There’s always people talking, there’s always things happening.”

“The things that I did, the people that I talked to, the stuff that I helped out with, it mattered to that person in the moment.”

Soon, she was engaging with women at the center and finding her stride, committing wholeheartedly to the undertaking. She recalls spending a week helping a woman create a resume and practice for job interviews. The woman spoke a little English, and Portuguese, which was “close-ish” to Benziger’s experience with Spanish. 

“I do a lot of things at �ֲ���ý and they’re very important in a big-picture, theoretical sense,” says Benziger, a triple major in music, history, and politics.

“But going to the center was getting to be important to somebody’s life in maybe a very micro sense, but also a very real sense, because the things that I did, the people that I talked to, the stuff that I helped out with, it mattered to that person in that moment.”

Not everyone enters college knowing what they want to do after graduation, or even what they want to major in. College is all about trying your hands at what interests you, developing new interests, and building relationships with the people around you.

For Bridget Thompson ’22 of Newtown, Pa., her time at �ֲ���ý has been full of discovery, as she found her people, her passions — in the classroom and on the sports field — and her post-grad plan.

“I am always striving to be the best person that I can be,” Thompson said. “Whatever I’m involved in or striving towards, I put a hundred percent of my effort into that.” 

In the classroom, she’s pouring that effort into her honors thesis in history, about Operation Demetrius, the infamous mass internment of suspected members of the Irish Republican Army by the British Army in 1971.

Inspired to tackle the topic after a semester in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin, Thompson is researching interrogation techniques used by the British Army during Operation Demetrius, and whether those techniques, as later judged by the European Court of Human Rights, were or were not torture.

“What was perpetrated against these suspected radicals was, in my opinion, a violation of their rights as human beings,” Thompson says.

Thompson also majors in art and visual culture, with an emphasis on art history and criticism. Both majors, she says, let her investigate ties between history and modern issues.

“What makes me most enthusiastic [about researching Operation Demetrius] is that you can trace its history to our current time” — including post-9/11 interrogation techniques used by the U.S. as part of the war on terror.

Thompson’s adviser for her thesis is Caroline Shaw, an associate professor of history. They meet regularly, for “an open dialogue, which is really great,” Thompson says.

“I think the professors that I’ve had the pleasure of working with in my time here have been really supportive,” Thompson says. “They’ve also pushed me to be a better thinker and to critically engage with the world around me, and then think about how I can place myself in it.”

While doing an honors thesis is mostly about individual effort, when it comes to her sport, field hockey, Thompson works on being a good teammate.

“You need to recognize your role in the team, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be the one that’s putting in a million goals, every game,” she says. “There are a lot of different ways that you can be a good teammate and a successful player besides what the stats show.” 

Off the field, Thompson is involved in a range of activities, serving as president of the �ֲ���ý Special Olympics Club and co-president of Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. She also has an interest in music, which led her to create a radio show, Rock History with Bridget, last year on WRBC. And she’s a Senior Fellow for the Admission office. 

“Having other things that excite me, besides the sport and besides my identity as a student on campus, has really enriched my time here,” Thompson says.

After exploring many �ֲ���ý offerings during her first two years, “figuring out exactly what I’m most interested in,” she’s now focusing her energy to those things, whether leading a student program or taking a deep dive into Irish history.

Looking ahead, Thompson hopes to enter the field of law. Describing herself, with a chuckle, as a “rule follower,” she says she’s always been intrigued by rules — “applying rules, interpreting, followed, violating.” Her thesis experience, especially, seeing how courts have evaluating human rights laws, has deepened that interest.

At �ֲ���ý, she says, “I have figured out what my strengths are. I’ve become more sure and confident in what I love to do, and that has helped me figure out what I think I want to do.”