My experience in Neurochemistry this past semester has been quite unique compared to other courses I’ve taken here at Concordia. With a very minimal background in neuroscience coming into the class, I was very worried about how I would do and how much I would be able to understand. But after building a background on a variety of topics the first couple weeks, I felt well prepared to tackle the challenging issues I would face throughout the semester. We learned all about the most recent science of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Bipolar, Migraines, and Parkinson’s, among others, by reading research articles. As we dug into our first few papers, one thing became clear to me. There is a fair amount we have learned, but there is so much more that we have yet to discover (AKA more research needs to be done, as the papers often say).
But as the semester went on, what started as an initial interest in the topics, grew into a passion for learning and understanding exactly what was going on and how researchers might approach the problem using the new information we read about in the papers. But the learning didn’t end there. At the end of each week we thoroughly discussed the societal implications of the research and the major issues, including both cultural and ethical. We also learned the importance of integration of other disciplines as the complex papers we read required knowledge of chemistry, biology, nutrition, and sometimes even sociology.
Yet perhaps the most important part of this class happened in between the research articles. Each week after discussion, we were required to write a blog post that would appear online, open to anyone to read. Now this seems like a simple task, but taking highly sophisticated, complex, and very confusing scientific research and morphing it into a manuscript that requires little to no background knowledge is quite the task. But without turning the complex ideas of science into something that can be understood by everyone really makes science completely useless. Being able to communicate science effectively is so vital to applying it to the vast array of complications it hopes to eliminate, and I’m proud to say that that is exactly what we learned in Neurochemistry.
So even though there is so much more research to be done, and at times it seems like we know a whole lot of nothing about everything, this class was not in vain. I have had a wonderful experience and have learned many skills that will be extremely useful for my future. I really can’t think of a more applicable class, for this is one that will certainly stick with me forever. I can’t think of a better way to cap off my career at Concordia.
Even Though It Seems We Know Nothing
