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Sue McConnell is the Susan B. Ford Professor of Biology and a co-director of The Senior Reflection. She is a developmental neurobiologist and a wildlife photographer.

Sue McConnell

Surprises

Just before the opening of the Senior Reflection exhibition, someone asked what I found surprising about the first year of TSR. I didn’t expect this question and found myself thinking first about what hadn’t been surprising. I wasn’t surprised by how creative our students were, nor was I surprised by the diversity of their interests and projects. But then I realized that there had been a huge surprise. For me, science is a largely linear, directed process. Sure there are unexpected findings along the way, but these are usually small diversions – little road blocks that one can drive around, and that rarely change one’s destination. What surprised me about some TSR projects were the paths they followed over the course of the year. These paths were complicated and nonlinear, like the turns of a river on a flat plain, meandering into oxbows that loop out and back. At the start of the year, I hadn’t realized that a short story might go through ten iterations that bore little resemblance to one another, apart from a central theme and a few characters. I hadn’t realized that a photoessay might morph into a free-verse poem. Or that paintings would become pen and ink drawings, or that drawings might become digital art. The range of exploration, discovery and reinvention surprised me. It shouldn’t have, but it did. And those rivers were amazing to watch as they carved out new banks and channels, each, in the end, reaching its destination, even though those destinations were not visible at the start.