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Princeton University Athletics
Soccer Alum Morelli '05 Discusses Graduate Educational Experience
April 18, 2012 | Women's Soccer
Sylvia Morelli '05 played for four NCAA tournament teams at Princeton, and her final moment in a Tiger uniform came when she accepted the NCAA College Cup semifinalist trophy after a nationally televised game against UCLA in 2004. She soon found herself on UCLA's campus as a graduate student, where she recently finished her Ph.D in social psychology. Here, Morelli sums up her work in her own words:
"As a graduate student, I have often drawn on my experiences as a Princeton soccer player. The five-year journey to my Ph.D parallels the growth that our team had over our four years at Princeton. One of the most important lessons I learned was to recognize my own and our team's weaknesses and to focus on improving them every day. Over our four years, we pushed ourselves beyond what we had achieved the day before and focused on consistently putting in the hard work. By applying this attitude to graduate school, I have slowly learned how to conduct neuroimaging studies and begun to understand the intricacies of how our brains work. I am particularly interested in why humans are so incredibly social and how our behaviors are driven by our need to connect with and understand others. My graduate work has focused on mapping what parts of brain are activated when we empathize with and share others' positive emotions (e.g. happiness) and negative emotions (e.g. sadness, anxiety). I have also examined how our brain responds when others understand and empathize with the positive and negative events in our own lives. In August, I will continue doing social neuroscience research as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. I will explore if activity in the brain can be used to predict how helpful and supportive individuals are in their everyday lives. As I look back at my journey through graduate school, I can see how my research has reflected my experiences as a Princeton soccer player. As teammates, we understood and shared each other's daily defeats and triumphs and supported each other through our best and worst moments. As a result, we formed social connections that will last a lifetime and built a team that succeeded both on and off the field."
