An unusual gap year
By Kriti Kalary UA’25 and Jim Stellar
Kriti came to the University at Albany with acceptance already assured into SUNY Upstate Medical School. She also had sufficient advanced placement credits from high school that she will finish her undergraduate degree work this academic year. That set up a gap year for the next academic year under unusual circumstances. Most undergraduates use a gap year to improve their academic record so they can get into graduate or medical or some other type of school. Kriti does not have to do that. So the question is, what is she going to do.
Kriti reached out to peers in her network who are or had been in a similar position. She discussed with them her preliminary thoughts about opportunities that she was interested in pursuing for her gap year and asked them about their experiences. One peer suggested getting more education in the form of a masters degree as this person was pursuing a masters herself in public health. Another peer suggested pursuing a job in industry to get a sense of what the industry research field looks like. He is working in a neuroinformatics company. Kriti also reached out to several neurologists about their experiences and inquired after their recommendations. Both recommended some sort of clinical research coordinator position to gain both patient experience and clinical research experience simultaneously. Is it surprising that each recommended that Kriti do what they were doing?
After this “research,” Kriti had a revealing conversation with a public health honors college lecturer here at the University at Albany. They discuss the inequalities in the current US healthcare system and it inspired her to think about working in this area. As a second generation Indian American who grew up in Germany from the ages of 5 to 13, Kriti had the opportunity to witness an entirely different healthcare system – a system that was not inundated with costs and lack of access and confusing insurance policies like the United States’. Kriti’s cultural heritage also prompted in her a deep respect for the elderly. Through her time volunteering at a nursing home, she saw the struggles that the residents there faced with neurodegenerative disorders and the distressing nature of end-of-life care for aging patients. Kriti is now considering a masters in public health in order to learn more about the systems governing healthcare in the United States to provide her a strong foundation to one day as a medical doctor to assist in driving change in these policies.
From Jim’s perspective, her decision came through emotions and their integration with her cognitive plans. It was something similar and perhaps milder that caused Kriti and Jim to come together in the first place to write this blog post. Writing a blog post with a professor was not part of a particular course or a program or a “check-box” in her undergraduate program. It is more of a small passion project that developed because we two wanted to do it. Now, it is true that we never would have found each other if Kriti had not taken Jim’s Psychopharmacology class in the first place, because it fit in with her program of study.
But then something more human took over, we connected. And here we are writing together. The same thing happened in her choice of what to do with her gap year when there was no good answer from the process itself. Her decision came from the heart (or as we would properly say from the limbic system). Of course, without the cognitive system (the cortex and likey the prefrontal cortex as the human brain’s most highly evolved planning brain area) none of this gut-level or heart-based decision-making would have happened. The cognitive process and the plans provided the structure, but the limbic system provided the value to make her decision after that somewhat unexpected conversation with the lecturer.
But this is how neuroscientists think the evolutionary older value-evaluating limbic system brain circuits communicate with the conscious, cognitive, neocortex. Not to be distracted here, but if you are interested, some of us wrote a blog post on the topic looking at frontal cortex trying to read the older evolved limbic system to incorporate value into its planning decisions.
So back to Kriti, what are her next steps and how do they feel as she actually takes them? This will be the subject of our next blog.
