Concordia College Moorhead being a liberal arts institution requires its students to take classes outside of the desired area of study we have chosen for ourselves. For a science major such as myself, classes such as writing, religion or a speech are examples. As a final requirement before a student graduates, we have to take a class that fulfills a “capstone” requirement. This class wraps up our time at Concordia and as well as the goals the college had for us during our time here. The course I chose to fulfill this capstone requirement was this Neurochemistry class. The class was unlike any class I have ever taken. And I loved it.
In both large and small college institutions, the normal lecture class consists of a professor rambling on continuously about a subject, maybe a quarter of the kids paying attention and trying to keep up with notes while the rest are sitting there dumbfounded wondering what the heck is going on. That was not the case when it came to this Neurochemistry class. Not only were we collaborating as a class talking about disorders and the science behind them everyday, but our professor was right there learning with us. The way the class worked was over the weekend we were assigned to read a fairly new review article about a specific disorder and bring questions to class about things we didn’t know or understand. It was very common that we would come to class on Mondays looking like a bunch of deer in headlights because we only understood bits and pieces of the entire scientific paper. But then, we tackled it together. Each person was assigned a specific topic from the paper to research for class Wednesday, and on Wednesdays we would “speed date” and teach our topic to the rest of the class in a one-on-one format. Having now understood (hopefully) the bulk of the paper, Fridays were set aside to talk about the disorder and everything from how its affecting society to what should be done next. Fridays were my favorite days because I was not only able to share my opinions about a disorder, but it also gave me time to listen to my peers and their take on what was going on. Once our week on a specific disorder was over, we were then required to share our thoughts on the disorder as well as the science behind it to the rest of the world in the form of a blog post. The entire process would start all over with a different disorder the following week.
I felt like this was the first class that I have taken as an undergraduate student that exposed me to what the real scientific world is like. I say this because science is all about collaboration. Whether that is collaborating to solve a common problem or collaborating to answer a question out of pure curiosity, there is a lot of dialogue between scientists. In this class, all that we did was collaborate. We worked to better understand a paper and disorder that none of us fully understood. With patience we were able to pull together to understand what it was saying. It was a great and new feeling to know that we all really were on the same level with the material and we were able to help each other out to understand it. As a class, we were also able to relay our new information about a disorder to the general public by writing blog posts about them. This too is apart of the scientific world that is not always easy because science is not an easy subject to understand.
I don’t know what this class would have been like if anyone besides our professor Dr. Julie Mach was teaching it. She made sure we knew that it was ok not to understand something and that she wasn’t going to completely understand everything either. The semester before the class begun, Dr. Mach organized a meeting for everyone that had signed up for the class. It was during this meeting that she made it very clear that we needed to be okay with not knowing everything that we needed to be okay talking about science especially the science we didn’t understand. I find this a really important aspect of a capstone class because never are we ever going to understand everything in life once we are on our own and we need to be okay admitting this. It was a breath of fresh air having a class that I went to three days a week in which I was involved in and that I was comfortable enough in to both express my questions and opinions about a disorder. Dr. Mach primed the class in which this was made possible.
In my opinion Neurochemistry was the epitome of a capstone class at Concordia College Moorhead. I loved learning about the disorders we talked about each week, I was able to link the topics directly to society as a whole, my classmates became new friends, it let me practice transmitting scientific information to the rest of the world and it taught me that it was okay not to know everything. I believe this class has prepared me for what the real world of science is like and was the perfect way to “cap off” my career as a Concordia College Student.
http://media.hometeamsonline.com/photos/lacrosse/CONCORDIAWOMENSLAX/homelogo.jpg?t=0.692389546005785
