Where do I begin? Last spring when I was registering for classes, I somehow had in my mind that I needed to take this class. That for some reason, this class was the required class for my chemistry major, and no other capstone class would compare. Fast forward to now, and I learned my assumptions were wrong, but I am glad I had them to start with.
The capstone course is an integral part of any major at Concordia. It seemed logical that I would take a neurochemistry simply because I was a chemistry major. I walked into class the end of August, and my entire learning process was thrown a curve ball. I am old school. I am significantly older than most, if not all, of my colleagues. I thought the only way to learn difficult subjects was to sit in class and listen to lecture after lecture, watch one power point slide morph into the next, and take endless amounts of notes that you can feel the early onset arthritis setting in.
This class was the exact opposite. For me, this class was not about what I learned and could regurgitate. It was more about being able to intelligently read an article (not a magazine one), understand the science behind it all, and communicate it, not only amongst my peers, but allow those who don’t have the extensive background we had to understand.
My biggest test was talking it over with my wife. If I got her to understand what I just learned, I accomplished one of the largest parts of the course. Now don’t get me wrong. My wife is intelligent in her own right; we just share different career/educational interests. Looking back now, I feel very bad for her. The conversations about how your day was must have been just smiling and nodding on her end. I never broke down Hess’ Law, equilibrium constants, light diffraction, and so on. I’m sure a lot of it went right over her head, but not this class. She followed along week after week, paper after paper.
So yea, there were some major pluses to this class, but at the same time there were a few negatives. Often times, the papers were SO difficult to digest. If there were not 18 of us in the classroom, I am pretty sure I would only understand 1/18 of what was written. The research required did not seem fair to be disseminated in only 90 seconds, and it seemed the amount of time invested did not pay off in the end. Yet as I look back, it seems to dictate what most of our lives require. If we have a presentation, we spend hours upon hours practicing, making sure it’s perfect, yet the message is delivered in a short period of time. This was the most perfect class to predict our professional future. It took me the entire four months to realize this, but I am grateful I took this class.
Capping it off – 4 months to sum up 4 years
