Before taking my capstone course at Concordia, I definitely had a bias towards any course that carried the “capstone” tag. The sound of the word itself had always led me to believe that any course with this title was one that was designed to be extremely rigorous and in a way the “final mountain” to climb in order to graduate. But as I conclude my semester long neurochemistry capstone course, I have realized that it is the exact opposite of what I led myself to believe. Not in the sense that the class was easy by any means but more so in the sense that this was a class that was set up in a way that was completely foreign to me.
Instead of learning in the classical classroom setting where the professor lectures and the students take notes only to be followed by quizzes and tests in the future, we were really challenged as students to learn in a new way. All of a sudden tests and assignments didn’t matter as much in this class. We still had them, but not in the general sense that we become so accustomed to in our first 3 years of college. We found ourselves being graded on critically thinking and real-world problem solving. We sought ways to create targets for new drugs and diagnose diseases in a different manner, things that seemed like they had real world application in the world right now. We learned how to take a problem, think critically, and then communicate results and engage in dialogue about the issue. I think back to our Wednesday’s where each of us had a specific topic that all pertained to one large problem or topic that we were discussing about as a class. Explaining our topics to fellow classmates caused us to engage in discussion about our topics, the problem as a whole, and how to solve the problem.
One of the things that I am most happy that we did was the Friday discussion time as well as the blogging. This forced us to take concepts that we learned in class that were extremely scientific and deep and take them and communicate them to a general audience while still explaining the science and getting a point across. The discussions led us to apply a topic to not just the scientific or medical community, but a wide range of other communities as well. This class in short was the first class that I think I have ever taken that is a science class but at the same time explains science in terms of society and politics and everything else at the same time. This is why it was such a different way to learn, because it put science in a completely different light than we were used to.
So as I have said before, I am extremely pleased with my capstone experience. It was nothing like I had thought it was going to be and everything that I thought it should be. It had me take all of the knowledge and skills that I have gained while at Concordia and put them into the area of study that I am most interested in while at the same time challenging me to apply these skills to the real world. It is safe to say that my view of what a capstone course is has completely changed. More than doing some big project or paper, this class has showed me what it is like to apply what I know to society in order to make a difference. After all, shouldn’t that be what a capstone course is all about? I think this type of class is what seniors need as we all prepare to graduate and go out into this world on our own.
Capstone: not what I thought, but what I wanted…
