Thoughts of a Psychology Student

This blog post is going to be slightly different from previous ones in that I'm simply going to document my day as it's been an interesting mix of focussed work and nonchalant wanderings... My day began at The Natural History Museum in Oxford. My college had organised a biology workshop in which we would be taught how to extract our DNA to assess whether or not we possessed the TAS2R38 gene that enables us to taste a bitter chemical called PTC. The practical involved us learning many modern techniques used frequently in laboratories in many universities. These included the Polymerase Chain Reaction, HaeIII Restriction Digestion and Gel Electrophoresis. The fiddly and careful procedures that we carried out in order to complete the experiment were made worthwhile when we viewed our results under UV light - a clear representation of our individual genotypes; a considerably startling and fairly mind-blowing sight. I then had one of the loveliest afternoons I've had...

Though I haven't posted on here in a while, it has seemed that a topic keeps cropping up in every day happenings so much so that I decided I should write about it. The topic in question is Stories. More precisely, the importance of stories in a literal sense but also as an abstract concept. I suppose this thought process began whilst I was debating whether or not to take a gap year before university. The idea of being able to travel the world in pursuit of so called 'self discovery' has always appealed to me, just as it did to Forster's Lucy Honeychurch and indeed John Green's  Quentin “Q” Jacobsen. But the more I thought about it, the more it  occurred  to me that perhaps this idea of finding out 'who you are' is just an idea found in story books and the first world. For want of a better phrase, self discovery is ultimately a "first world problem". So what does this have to do with stories? Well during a discussion with one of the teache...