In all honesty, before this class started I was secretly a little terrified for it. Now, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t excited about it too–I knew basically everyone in the class and really enjoyed the professor, so I was excited about those aspects. Prior to this class I had very little (and I mean VERY little) neuro experience, therein laid my terror. In retrospect, that terror was completely unwarranted, and as the weeks went by I became increasingly shocked at how much I was learning. The premise of the class was to initially (in the first few weeks) gain a general knowledge of neurological processes, e.g. receptor types and basic pathway mechanisms. As the class progressed the goal was to utilize those original tools to help decipher scientific papers about neurological disorders. This whole process was amalgamated with the use of individual presentations and group discussions in order to instill and solidify the information we were learning.
The learning aspect of this class was unique, and something I had never experienced before. Starting the first day we decided that instead of a normal classroom setup with rows of desks, we wanted to be in a circle, which Dr. Mach promptly termed “The Nest.” This allowed us to have a more open style of face-to-face communication in the class. The first few weeks, while we explored the pertinent background information, the class was loosely structured like any normal class: we would be assigned papers to read about the receptors or pathways and sets of questions to answer that would further our understanding, and then we would briefly lecture about and discuss the topic in The Nest. When we started delving into the papers about neurological disorders, the class started veering from traditional learning. The learning in this class was very self-lead. We were assigned to read articles about disorders, followed with a class discussion about all of the topics we did not understand. We would then, as a class, get to choose what to explore in greater detail. It would be our responsibility to pick a topic, research it, and present in some fashion the next class day. To wrap up the paper and solidify what we learned, the week would end with group discussions. These discussions served not only to retouch on the nitty gritty mechanisms, but to broaden the topic and look at the societal implications and big picture. The latter often led to some very engaging discussions in which we would delve into societal issues and the steps necessary to solve problems–this added a more global aspect to the class and really connected the field to other areas.
The writing component of this class was as well a completely different experience than I was familiar with. Writing papers was unheard of, instead blog posts were the medium for our written assignments. The goal of the blogs was to relay the information we learned that week to the general public, and in a way that was understandable to someone who isn’t a scientist. This was a very interesting exercise, as usually when writing for a science class you try and write everything very concise and to the point. For the blogs we had to transform the science into a readable and understandable text from which people could learn something. This approach required that we actually understand the science enough to rewrite it in a completely different way, which was an extremely effective way of learning and reinforcing topics from class.
In all, I was extremely pleased with my capstone experience as a whole. This class enabled me to think deeper about topics I was not overly familiar with, and feel more comfortable with subject matter. I was able to understand the material and form it into a new medium in which others could learn from. Additionally, this class was simply fun on a basic level; my peers were a blast to be in class with, and Dr. Mach was a co-learner, rather than someone talking at us for 70 minutes straight. It is classes like this one that remind me how lucky I am to be at Concordia, fully immersed in the academic world.
