A Visit to Aotearoa

My name is Axelle Renaudin, and I spent three months with IMAGE Otago as a research intern between my Bachelor's in Cognitive Science and my Master's in Cognitive Neuroscience. I came in eager to learn whatever I could, and I came away with far more than I'd imagined!

Over those three months I had a hand in a bit of everything: I worked on several stages of the MRI data preprocessing, wrote scripts to automate some of the data extraction and comparison, drafted participant-recruitment posts, and got to follow new studies while they were being designed. I even made a happy lab rat myself :). Three months is short to be fully folded into a lab's projects, but I still got to see the technical side of neuroscience that we so rarely encounter in class, and to discover just how useful programming can be for the practical work and for saving time in analysis.

More than anything, it was the people who made the experience. Olivia and the whole team were incredibly welcoming and kind, and there's a real sense of cooperation and connection running through the group. Their projects were really fascinating, and they always found a way to involve me so that I could help while still learning something along the way. That mix of warmth and generosity is a lot of what made me want to keep doing research. A research internship really is the best way to find out what cognitive neuroscience is, and I feel very lucky to have done mine with this team. Thank you Olivia, and thank you to the whole team!!

Three last things:

1. It’s tough to listen to Kiwis speak English for three months, but it works :)

2. Being in the South Island let me see landscapes more beautiful than any I'd seen before!

3. My marvellous brain, made in this lab, arrived safely in Paris!