That’s me at a neuroscience conference reporting on a year + of undergraduate research under Dr. Askvig at Concordia College. My fiance, Mitchell, is next to me. My college experience was a lot of long nights studying and doing homework, conducting research, and a couple of fun moments spending time with my peers and Mitchell.
But wow, how do you summarize your whole college experience in one post? Trying to pick a picture to summarize it made me want to make a never ending collage encompassing almost 4 years of my time. (Don’t worry, I didn’t actually do it- I realize it would only be my nostalgia clogging up the post then…)
I graduate college in less than a week and it honestly hasn’t hit me yet. That was a lot of work packed into less than 4 years.
I’ve spent my whole life that I can remember in school – and even though I am not done with my degrees yet, this will mark the end of another chapter. I can’t believe I won’t be living in Moorhead anymore either!
I can’t help but look around at all of the faces of my classmates and realize that I may never see them again after spending so much time staying up all night studying with them or seeing them in class every day.
That’s a weird feeling.
When I look back at all of my classes in my college career, (although I had a lot of issues trying to post blogs on here) my neurochemistry capstone course makes my top 5 list for classes I will be able to use outside of college.
This class took all of my science courses in biology, chemistry, and neuroscience and made me think critically about each field together. It was also a welcome break from the lecture, lab, and exam format we are so used to.
We read scientific papers and had to engage our classmates from different fields of study on how to critically analyze each article. We started by telling each other what we didn’t understand, then we each tackled one of those topics to report to the class the next day, and finally we learned how to talk about these subjects in a way that is useful for the public.
Before this class, I’d never learned how to explain scientific papers to people outside of the scientific community. I’d tried to explain some things of course, but it didn’t always come out as well as I had planned.
Now I can say that I know how to relate these topics to more people, so when I am not in an academic environment all of the time (in less than a week!), I’ll be able to speak about these things in a much better manner.
Overall, this class helped me to make connections between all of the fields of study I have been researching in the last years. It blew my mind to see how one pathway can actually relate to almost all of the neurodegenerative diseases we have seen.
The class has shown me how many things I do not understand and given me a hunger for more.
Thanks for reading my posts (if anyone actually has). 😉
Neurochemistry Capstone Overview
