Jacinda Taggett
When I first enrolled in college, I wanted to be a therapist. I thought that psychology majors were destined for counseling and neuroscience majors were destined for medicine. This was my naive background that I had going into college, as I was the first one in my family to attend a four-year university.
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After the first few weeks of my General Psychology class in my first year, I knew that I wanted to pursue research. I had spoken with my Teaching Assistant at the time, a memory researcher in a Ph.D. program, and this was my introduction to academia. I will be honest that I did not even know what a Ph.D. was, let alone the challenges that academics took in order to obtain this degree. I just knew that I wanted to conduct psychological research to study human learning and memory, therefore that was my destined path.
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Over the next few years I would put my dream of being a memory researcher on the back burner, as COVID-19 isolation and undiagnosed mental illness got the best of me. It wasn't until halfway through my third year that I had gotten my first research internship. Thankfully for me, it was in a lab dedicated to memory! It was quite lucky of me to obtain this position, as I had attended office hours for this professor and simply asked how to get into memory research. He told me that given my experiences and background, I should reconsider Ph.D. programs... as only the best individuals are actually successful (i.e., obtaining tenure faculty positions in an R1 institution). I was disheartened at first, but I don't hold any resentment for this conversation. I think this motivated me into becoming one of the best undergraduate researchers in only one year's time.
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Over the next 12 months I dedicated all of my free time to undergraduate research. I interned at three labs, each providing me unique skillset and experiences. I was able to collect various types of data, practice my coding skills for data analysis and management, as well as present my research findings in an international conference. I even started a club dedicated to providing resources to students in the psychological or neural sciences so they could be given the same opportunities as I luckily had. All of this work paid off, as I was able to get multiple job offers for full-time research positions prior to even graduating, and I graduated with a Departmental Citation for my passionate dedication to research.
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I am currently in a post-grad research position, where I spend my time creating large datasets, analyzing neuroimaging and cognitive data, as well as meeting with various researchers across the nation. I plan to work here until 2026, when I will hopefully be accepted into a Ph.D. program so I can accomplish my goal of becoming a cognitive neuroscientist.
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Given my unusual success in academia so far, I hope to inspire other students with minimal resources or representation to become successful researchers. I began this website, inspired by my own TikTok account of the same name (@academicmemories), in order to give free resources to these future academics. Only with guides and resources like these can academia truly be accessible.
