My capstone course, Neurochemistry 475, truly encapsulated what it means to become responsibly engaged in our world. The course has the same name as the degree I will obtain in May of 2020, so it feels only fitting that the expansive topics I have learned about and experienced this semester through this course, from intracellular signaling to community action, have informed my student life and my citizen of the world life.
I can confidently say that this was my favourite course taken at Concordia. The perfect complement to my last year, this capstone course brought together all of my favourite things about studying science and allowed me to take them into the real world and apply them to the broader everyday life situation.
Neurochemistry 475 was at its heart (at its nerves?) a journal club. Each Monday, we met to discuss a paper we had read over the weekend about a myriad of neuroscientific topics. Throughout the semester, we looked at Alzheimer’s Disease, schizophrenia, obesity, addiction, concussion, cannabinoids, and the brain reserve among other experiences to try and understand more about what happens in our brains. While the topic each week changed, the general story of molecular and chemical signaling remained surprisingly congruent, with the same major players showing up again and again. Some of these are proteins, transcription factors, or second messengers that seem to be everywhere in cellular signaling. Often, something found to be dysregulated in one disease would also be implicated in another experience (one fascinating example of this is Alzheimer’s Disease and Type 2 Diabetes and the story of insulin hormone resistance in the brain). This interconnectedness between the neuron and human experience has shown to manifest in a great number of ways, but grand themes remain constant.
On Fridays, we met outside of the classroom for lengthy, stimulating, and at times heated discussions about that week’s topic. Even though we met at 8 in the morning, this was my favourite class of each week for the semester! After the in depth analysis and critical investigation of the molecular and chemical signaling pathways that we began earlier in the week, on Fridays we broadened our neurochemical conversation to include environmental and societal implications and factors that can impact someone’s experience. For example, when we talked about schizophrenia, we explored the underrepresentated and underheard voice of women in the medical field, as both medical professionals and patients, to understand why men are diagnosed with schizophrenia (not to mention any other mental health disorder) so much earlier in life than women. In our discussion about cannabinoid reception, we considered the racial undercurrent fueling the War on Drugs and how people of colour are more harshly stigmatized to have drug problems and more violently sentenced with drug (specifically marijuana) related offenses. Friday discussions allowed for the integration of tiny, molecular and neural network ideas with expansive, global network issues and experiences.
Neurochemistry 475 provided the much needed open and encouraging atmosphere with which to bring difficult topics like race, gender, religion, and sexuality into the conversation about the network of electrical and chemical impulses in our brains that ultimately are formed by and inform our experience. Neurochemistry 475 embodies the spirit of liberal learning by exploring the similarities that occur within and between neural diseases and disorders, the life factors that impact these experiences, and the interconnectedness by which all of us live.
