Neurochemistry – it sounds like a lot to wrap your brain around (see what I did there), and it is. I guess I could say I had no idea what to expect for this class. I chose it because it made the most sense to fulfill the senior capstone requirement and my chemistry elective. Besides that, I had always had the desire to learn more about neuroscience, but poor planning on my part did not allow me to do this in during undergraduate education. I had missed the all important, and apparently eye-opening, meeting in the spring. So on day one, Dr. Mach says that we all should know what we’re getting ourselves into. Let’s just say my reality check about what Neurochemistry would be came about four months after everyone else.
The class was set up as discussion based, something quite foreign to my lecture style science courses. I have roommates in social work and psychology who spend their days discussing readings, but to do so for our very technical, scientific papers was daunting thought. In the end, it was a breath of fresh air to my very content heavy courses with regular homework and exams. Neurochemistry had a different routine of reading the article for the beginning of the week, researching topics to clarify information in the article, and a discussion day talking about the significance the topic had for society. Finally, we were required to summarize that week’s topic on our Cobber’s on the Brain blog.
Basically, each week we struggled to read articles to understand the details of pathways, receptors and molecules we hadn’t learned about or had just reviewed at the beginning of the semester. I can’t say I could tell you the exact mechanism for each neurological disorders we talked about, but I can say that I learned how to critically read articles. You might be thinking, “Doesn’t sound like you learned very much.”
I would say you’re wrong. I would argue that I have gained or at least strengthened a skill that I hope my undergraduate courses have been forcing me to do. I can efficiently find the important pieces of an article, look further into topics that were unfamiliar, and put the pieces together in a cohesive picture on this blog. I didn’t have a professor standing in front of the room saying “This is how it is.” Instead, I was forced to pull things out of the article, ask the right questions, find the proper resources, and come up with the bigger picture. The picture may have been mostly hypothesizing, but it still required active thinking – something that can be lacking in lecture style courses.
I wouldn’t be as confident in saying I have improved on this ability, if it weren’t for the exams. The exams required little preparation, and instead put us in the live task of reading and critically analyzing an academic article. Honestly, in the moment, I wasn’t sure whether I made any connections or whether I was pulling things out of thin air. But when I got the results of our in-class and take-home portions, it turned out that I was able to put more of the story together before my further research than I had thought.
I would say that Neurochemistry has been a good change of pace in my science heavy senior year. I was able to expand on a useful skill, break out of my comfort zone a little, and learn how to communicate about science to the general public. The Capstone experience is supposed to have an interdisciplinary component and our Friday discussions really fulfilled that. We broke out of our narrow science topic and discussed the larger impact. I think this class fulfilled the Capstone goal and was an interesting addition to one of my last semesters at Concordia.
