Junyi Chu
My fascination with the developing mind began at the playground. I was always the big kid who was corralling her friends, younger brother, and the neighborhood children into various roles and who kept the games going until parents yelled for dinner to begin. I suppose that’s how I learned how to engage children’s attention, but all I was doing was having fun.
In high school I was never great at lab science. After nearly passing out at a mice brain dissection lab, I decided science as I knew it was not for me. But I did love school, first as a student and even more as an educator. After some wonderful stints teaching math and science at public schools and working with children with special needs I decided to study child development in college and prepare for a career improving children’s learning experiences. At the time I couldn’t find this major in Singapore (and also couldn’t find a scholarship board who would fund such a degree) so I applied to colleges in the US.
A series of unplanned encounters showed me a different path in science. I thank my sophomore year cognitive development professor, Georgene Troseth, for showing me what I call the “Mickey Mouse violation of expectation experiment” (Wynn, 1992). As an international student navigating a foreign culture I’d been nervous to attend office hours or interact with faculty outside of the lecture hall. But after I saw that experiment I was sufficiently curious to ask how I could “do something like that” and she kindly let me sit in her lab despite it being halfway through the semester. “That” turned out to be quite many hours of recruiting families and refining my child-directed voice in exchange for very brief moments of actually working with children. But I was hooked - each week brought us closer to discovering something new! Georgene also introduced me to Bethany Rittle-Johnson who let me propose my own experiments, supervised my honors thesis and who remains a mentor to this day.
At the end of college I was quite torn between my initial plan to “positively impact early education” and “discover how children actually learn”, so I applied to PhD programs in both educational technology and developmental psychology. The admissions committees must have known I wasn’t quite sure about either and I failed to get a single interview. By then I had only two months left on my student visa and so I quickly accepted the first job offer that allowed me to stay in the US: managing the effervescent Language and Development Lab, directed by David Barner at UCSD. Dave and the rest of the lab welcomed me to the field of Cognitive Science, quite literally: a couple weeks before my job began, I stayed at the lab’s Airbnb for my first Cognitive Science conference! Getting to work with researchers across psychology, linguistics, and philosophy at UCSD really broadened my horizons and helped me pin down what about the mind really intrigued me. I also gained some valuable skills that prepared me for graduate school.
Now I’m back to observing how kids play ;)
Outside research, I enjoy long walks in and outside the city and trying new food. I am terrified of birds.
