Honestly, I mainly took neurochemistry because I had to for my minor. I’ve never been all that into chemistry, and my expectations were about at the level of “this should be alright”. I thought it would be like a lot of other upper level classes: stuff I had learned before, but in a little more depth this time. We’d get a bit of new stuff after weeks of wading through dullness. I’m veeeery glad to say that I was wrong. This class ended up being exactly the way I like to learn, get some of the newest findings and wade in. It was great that rather than being dragged along a path that probably wasn’t much different from one a student year ago took, Dr. Mach was heading out with us into some unknown territory, if only a bit.
Each week we started on Monday with new journal article on some interesting part of neuroscience. We read it beforehand and came with some questions, then worked together, professor and students, to understand what the article was saying, what had been found, and what it might mean. Sometimes we got a bit lost, especially when we read that paper dealing with marijuana, or whenever Anchorman came up, but we always figured things out and got some questions answered. The questions we didn’t answer, including the new ones we’d come up with that day, became targets for Wednesday. We all threw out some topics we wanted to know more about, then decided who would take which one. Then for Wednesday we would research our topic in order to teach our classmates about it. For a while we ran with mini lectures, but after time kept running just a bit short, we changed to talking about our topics one on one with each other. On Friday we moved class to Knutson Campus Center (I think mainly for the couches), where we split into two groups, each with a couple discussion leaders, to spend the class just discussing the paper. We would help each other with lingering questions, talking about the implications or what we’d learned, both scientific and social, just occasionally, again, getting off topic… this was a pretty relaxed class. But we learned a ton, in a way that was far more engaging and enjoyable than most classes.
This was a capstone course, but I think for me personally it was a great way to cap off my time at Concordia. It was a good example of some of the best aspects of a liberal arts education here. We got through a lot of information, but in a small class where we could always ask questions or help steer the discussion. We helped each other learn more than we could have alone, or listening to some professor drone half a mile away at the head of a 200 person class, and we had fun while doing it. Experiences like this make me glad I chose Concordia.
Capping off Neurochem
