One of the predominant reasons that I applied to and accepted the Brackenridge Fellowship in the University of Pittsburgh Frederick Honors College was the opportunity to participate in the community of other scholars across disciplines. This community is also further broken up into seven different cohorts that allow fellows a chance to connect more closely with students. These cohorts provide opportunities to practice communicating research to an audience outside of your own field as well as chances to open up to new ways of looking at a research question. 

Among my cohort there is a biology major, a neuroscience student, a computer science major, and an english language & anthropology student. As a chemistry major myself working on a project utilizing computation and environmental science I find frequent overlaps with my peers. Nearly all of us are working in STEM fields and are therefore working with more quantitative data. Additionally, one member of my cohort is coding a weather application, which I find to have many similarities to my own project, we are both using computational methods and looking at meteorological and atmospheric conditions. The primary difference, however, is that I am approaching the project as an atmospheric chemist, and this member of my cohort is approaching his project as a computer scientist. This experience has already shown me that there is a lot that I can learn from my peers and there is also a lot that I can share in return. I am looking forward to getting to know more about the other projects that my cohort is working on so that we can continue to find overlaps and share knowledge with one another. 

Working with interdisciplinary groups is a critical component of learning the language to use when sharing research with a general audience. There are inevitable obstacles at first when sharing your research, mostly given that there is not often a consistent baseline knowledge that everyone has and it can be hard to gauge what background knowledge individuals have without having prior conversations. That being said, this cohort will allow all fellows a chance to make mistakes and learn from them so that we can all grow as researchers. Conducting research and formulating a result is only the first step in bringing about change and communication is the barrier that many struggle to overcome. The Brackenridge Fellowship program will undoubtedly be a fantastic opportunity to break down that barrier and make Pitt a place where cutting edge research happens!