I’m Vidushi, a senior in the Philosophy department and Cognitive Science program from Secaucus, New Jersey.
Philosophy–quite literally, the love of wisdom–has been a natural interdisciplinary home for me at Princeton. My most treasured courses and research experiences over the past four years have given me insight into the questions humanists have been asking for millennia– what makes a painting beautiful? What makes an argument convincing? Do we have common values and duties?
In Adam Maloof and Frederik Simons’ Earth’s Environments and Ancient Civilizations, I learned interdisciplinary connections between the humanities and sciences by geophysics to find evidence of unexcavated underground structures from the ancient Cypriot town of Marion. Joshua Katz’s Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics taught me about the shared cultural and linguistic qualities of the ancient languages I love to study. Right now, my thesis fuses lessons from philosophy and psychology to explore ways to make political disagreements more productive and truth-conducive given current polarization.
I am the founder of Princeton’s undergraduate Cognitive Science Society, a writer for Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research, and I sing with Umqombothi, Princeton’s African a capella group. I’ve travelled to every continent (besides Antarctica) while at Princeton, spending six surreal months hiking New Zealand last spring. I enjoy creative writing, tennis, longboarding, and swing dancing, and most recently, have started to learn how to rock climb and dance tango!
