Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

My parents had the resources to be able to find a different kind of education system for me.

So they moved me the following year into a private school that had, as it turns out, much more

rigorous and interesting academics in addition to all kinds of theater and art and singing and all these other things that I was very interested in.

And so I started there in seventh grade and I just really fell in love with science class.

Thank you, Mrs. Susan Lundgren, if you're still out there.

for really teaching us so much interesting stuff.

We were doing all these laboratory experiments where we were dissecting all kinds of things from flowers and worms to fish.

That really pulled me in.

For my seventh grade science project, I decided to try to figure out how sight works, how we see in the eyeball, what the eyeball is structured like.

I read all about it and

My dad went with me and he basically got a bunch of cow eyeballs harvested out of some cows who had been slaughtered.

And we brought home this bag of eyeballs for me to dissect.

And I put it in the refrigerator and my poor grandmother came to visit and was like, what's this in the refrigerator?

And realized it was a bag full of eyeballs.

But I did go on to take those eyeballs apart and really, you know, try to figure out what are these different parts?

How do they relate to the model I have here and what role they're playing in vision?

And, you know, I really just loved to be sort of self-directed and designing my own project and kind of digging in on it, but also being accountable to share what I had learned in a more rigorous academic way at school.

So I really thrived that year.

Oh, I always loved to build things.

And, you know, growing up on this sort of little farm thing in the woods, right?