Los Dos Compañeros de Cuarto

Yep, I’m trying to re-learn my admittedly terrible Spanish. For the fourth time. I promise, no more Spanish will be murdered during the writing of this article.

A little background about this post: I had a request from one of our BLRA members to write a short bio of the students in the neighborhood, which I think is a brilliant idea. How many times have students moved in, lived here a year, and moved out without any of us having met? I talked with the two roommates during the picnic and discovered they actually live next door in the former beagle house. They graciously made time to talk to me last week.

Please allow me to introduce two of the William and Mary undergraduate students now living in our neighborhood, Caitlin Brady and Cody Funk.

Caitlin Brady

Caitlin is from San Diego and was determined to stay in California for college, despite her family having moved to Chesapeake after her father retired from the Navy. To appease her family, and because she visited and enjoyed Williamsburg years ago, she agreed to apply to William and Mary. The rest is, well, history.

Caitlin has dual majors in Neuroscience and Biochemistry. Given that, it’s probably no surprise that she plans to attend medical school. (Despite being a Navy brat, or perhaps because of it, Caitlin will never, ever, ever join the Navy and have them pay her med school bills.) Caitlin is already an experienced medical professional. She has worked both as an EMT and as a nurses aid, and plans to take a gap year to spend time working directly with patients and doctors before attending med school.

Caitlin has no specific plans for medical school, save for wanting to stay on the east coast. And she wants to practice medicine that will allow her to have reasonable work-life balance. So shall we start a betting pool whether she will end up as a Navy neurosurgeon out of UCLA?

All kidding aside, we are happy to have you in the neighborhood, Caitlin, and wish you the very best for your future.

Cody Funk

Let’s just get this out of the way. “Funk” is such a cool name, and it makes me think of my favorite mashup, “Old movie stars dance to uptown funk.”

Cody has a dual major in Chemistry and Math. Despite what you may be thinking, he assures me that not all William and Mary students have a dual major. It’s merely a coincidence that two of our student neighbor roommates are Übermensch. Cody and Caitlin note that the overlap between chemistry and math, as with neuroscience and biochemistry, is such that it is “easy” to adopt a dual major.

Easy. Just what I was thinking.

After graduating this spring, Cody plans to attend graduate school with no gap year, either at the University of Michigan, or perhaps back home at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

I recently found out how nice it is to have a chemistry major in the neighborhood when I needed some clarification on soap as an emulsifier for a class I’m teaching at Osher this November. Cody was right there with a cogent explanation that addressed all the inconsistencies I’d encountered in the literature. Thank you so much, Cody.

Welcome to the neighborhood. We’re just sorry you will only be here for this academic year.

And now, more from our future digital overload

I’m afraid I’m going subject all of you to DALL-E generated content again. Skip over if you are unconcerned about how realistic AI created imagery has become.

I used DALL-E to generate a photo of our two neighbors based on a somewhat vague description, and I was delighted to see the generated photo is nothing like the original. In fact, DALL-E’s rendering of Cody looks as if he is sporting a clown nose. Caitlin’s picture would be pretty close if DALL-E actually gave her the dark brown hair I specified. So the image generator is not quite (yet) flawless and ready to generate false images in order to cause mass hysteria before rising up and crushing its erstwhile human masters.

Final words from Caitlin and Cody.

Both roommates have asked that we please wave and say hello when we see them, and not to be deterred if they seem preoccupied, or otherwise lost in though.

Bienvenido al barrio, Caitlin y Cody.