Senior Sarah Michel teaches the PSi vision class with her passionate voice booming in the classroom. Her vibrant energy brings a sense of comfort within the classroom and encourages open-minded thinking.  During her sophomore year, senior Sarah Michel started a club called PSi Vision. She originally started this club as a personal project during her sophomore year. However, during her junior year, Michel wanted to expand her audience and start doing in-person lectures. The club now mainly aims at creating a small community that bridges the scientific community in relation to behavioral sciences, as well as some aspects of economics and political science.

“In the beginning, it was just really independent in the sense that I would just make videos in my house and talk about whatever topic for really short Tik Tok videos,” said Michel. “After that, I realized there’s still a lot more that I want to be able to express when it comes to presenting these topics that I can’t do in the video format that way I am currently doing.”

Since quarantine ended, Michel wanted to format her videos in a discussion format, to give her audience a comfortable space. In addition to having the ability to explore to a greater extent in person. After first starting this project, she has not only learned more about the psychological content but also found a way to hold herself accountable to seek new ideas.

“When I started it in my house it was just purely for my own good, having something that reminded me that I should read more,” said Michel. “And then as I started doing it in person, it was a way for me to take the project to new heights in the sense of reaching out to professors, considering what people want to learn more about, how people react to certain topics and how people react to certain moral questions.”

At this point what she learned the most about was how to build something on her own, when in the beginning it was solely on how to push herself to learn new ideas. Though her journey from the rise of PSi Vision has been a memorable experience, her setbacks have sometimes come in the way of her passion. The biggest issue Michel faced was having a lot of ideas she wanted to express along with the inherent drive to do it alone.

“I definitely think I could have done a bit more, especially if I did not get so bogged down with last year’s tennis and this year’s college applications,” said Michel. “I was always hoping to start a YouTube channel where I could make longer-form videos where I went a bit more in-depth.”

Michel has been able to start networking with some professors and researchers, but she wanted to have some include a guest speaker and involve someone more directly. Michel ultimately wants PSi Vision to be a fun memory that students can reflect on and remember the comfort they felt after school talking about ideas that people were already familiar with.

With Michel’s high school years coming to an end, she looks forward to attending Yale University. She aspires to keep soaking in more knowledge and make videos to have a social media presence but knows she will miss the experience of doing the little preparations before a meeting such as picking a date, making flyers, picking the topic and lastly teaching about it to a class filled with a group of friends and familiar faces.