wait, so are you a neuroscience major? What do you do? I think it sounds really cool, but i'm bad at math, so.
I am in fact a neuroscience major twice. I did my undergrad degree in Neuroscience, and now I’m doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience. And I love it. Its a fantastic subject.
I am actually not completely sure what you want to know about from your ask, so I’m just going to sort of attempt to cover everything I can think of, and if you want something clarified you can come back and ask again.
Neuroscience is a really really broad field. It covers everything brain and nerve related. So topic wise that’s everything related to the brain, the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, as well as how the nervous system interacts with other systems like the immune system. Neuroscientists work at every level of biology. That ranges from genetics, to how specific proteins work inside cells (molecular biology or biochemistry), to specific cells, or how cells interact (cellular neuroscience, electrophysiology), to larger networks (systems neuroscience), right up to how the brain produces thought and behaviour (cognitive neuroscience). Neuroscientists can also work on making computer models of cells or of brains (computational neuroscience). That isn’t even all the major branches, it’s really very diverse.
I specifically, am working in Neuroimaging, and investigating personality using functional MRI. Neuroimaging is one of the most multidisciplinary fields, it involves information from cognitive neuroscience, psychology,cellular neuroscience, and neurovascular physiology (the specific way the blood supply to the brain works is a field in and of itself) to design experiments and interpret data, but to actually do experiments I use techniques from computer science, statistics and signal processing. And actually using MRI involves physics, but I’m not involved in that directly, I just trust the physicists and MR techs and say thank you to them a lot. I love this and its one of the reasons I picked this field to work in.
If you want to know what exactly what neuroscientists do all day, you’re really going to have to pick a field or two though, because if I try to sum them all up I’ll be here all night. But very briefly, it can range from what I do, to focusing more on behavioural tests, and working with patients with specific illnesses or lesions, or working with animals to see the effects of whatever you’re studying on their brain, to working with individual cells cultured in dishes, its hugely variable.
And neuroscientists come from a lot of backgrounds, a lot of us started in some part of biology, or psychology and increasingly, from actual neuroscience undergrads, because they’re getting more common, but there are also engineers and physicists, and computer scientists, and in some places you can do cognitive science degrees, which are a combination of computer science, psychology, neuroscience and philosophy, centred around cognition.
In terms of what a neuroscience UNDERGRAD does, if you’re more interested in getting a first degree, you’re probably going to do a little bit of everything neuroscience related. Neuroscience programs vary a but, you’ll do intro sciences and math, then the biological sciences (genetics, cellular, biochem, organic chemistry, etc), and then a combination of specific neuroscience courses and psychology courses. The man who designed my program thought a liberal arts type background was important, so I also took some anthropology, and humanities, and a combined history/ethics course, but depending on where you are you might stay more science focused. And in terms of course type, it’ll be a combination lectures, lecture/lab combos and some discussion classes, where you read and analyze current research, in all likelihood. I also had pure lab courses. You’ll essentially finish with a crash course in each of the neuroscience related fields.
Its a really great degree. I went into it planning to go into a neuroscience Ph.D. which worked well, but it will also set you up well to go to medical school, or into clinical psychology, or physiotherapy/occupational therapy, if you’re interested in health care. Not to mention any number of research adjacent careers. If you want specifically, to know about the mechanics of a research career, come back and let me know, I’ll make a separate post, its kind of involved.
I want to specifically address you’re comment that you’re bad at math. PLEASE DO NOT LET MATH SCARE YOU AWAY FROM NEUROSCIENCE!!!
Its a little hard to give specific advice about this because ‘bad at math’ can cover everything from intimidated, to having a disability like dyscalculia.
At undergrad level, I took 2 math courses, calculus, and linear algebra. And an introductory statistics course. Outside of my math specific courses there was a few basic calculations in chemistry and genetics, and in my research based courses I used the stats I’d already learned in my stats course. But it isn’t a math heavy degree.
If mostly you’re just intimidated, or have trouble keeping up with math and the undergrad math is what’s frightening you off, most universities have a LOT of tutorial resources for intro math, because a lot of people have trouble with them (and they mostly get through them and go on to do very well). If you’re concerned about statistics, don’t be, the actual math involved in statistics is incredibly straight-forward, it looks complicated, when you write it out, but its essentially all the y = mx + b equation you learned in 7th or 8th grade, with some fancy clothing on. Also, a lot of stats is done using statistics programming. That doesn’t involve doing the math yourself, it involves understanding what to tell the computer.
That’s pretty much how I do math too. I use really complicated math (I spent all today on independent components analysis), but I don’t actually have to be able to do it, just understand how it works, and how to interpret the results it gives me.
If you do have dyscalculia or some other math-related learning disability I can’t really give a lot of specific advice, but there is plenty of neuroscience you can do that doesn’t involve math, and you can almost certainly work around it in courses if your instructors are cooperative (the majority of professors are nice and will help, they just don’t know what you need until you explain, unfortunately).
But please, please, whatever you do, don’t buy into the obnoxious idea that struggling with math in school permanently shuts you out of STEM!
I hope this at least moves in the direction of what you wanted to know, I will happily answer any other neuroscience or brain related questions you may have :). Neuroscience is wonderful and I totally recommend it.
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