Neurochemistry is Interdisciplinary
The neurochemistry course is the poster class for interdisciplinary education and makes it so easy to love learning. While offered only to senior neuroscience majors/minors and ACS chemistry majors, the interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience brings together so many perspectives and they all connect on the basis of chemistry. Many in my cohort had double majors or minors in business, nutrition, psychology, biology, chemistry, mathematics, and neuroscience and every discussion, both in-class and virtual, analyzed a very different perspective of our weekly topics. Even on papers that only discussed biochemical signaling, genetics, or biosynthesis, when our class came together, connections were drawn to any field. In particular, many of the discussion topics in our small groups were about applications of the paper and not so much on the actual biochemistry. Neurochemistry sounds like a daunting subject but this interdisciplinarity takes away the fear and allows for us to discuss a complex topic in any way we’d like. There were nights where I found myself falling down the rabbit hole when researching what dreams are, psychedelic drugs, memory disorders, the American housewife drug crisis, etc. all because of what this course instilled in me.
Neurochemistry is a Liberal Arts Course
The neurochemistry class is exactly what learning at a liberal arts course should look like. To me, a liberal arts education is one that fosters learning from multiple perspectives with people from every demographic. In addition to the interdisciplinary nature of the field, neurochemistry is a strong liberal arts course. I elected to take a PEAK through this course and partnered with the graduating class of social work majors by coordinating a donation drive with ShareHouse, a substance addiction recovery program. This was my first time coordinating an event with anybody, nonetheless an organization. Working on this project, it was clear that neurochemistry and social work students have different ways of thinking. Almost every course I’ve taken at Concordia was in psychology, chemistry, neuroscience, or mathematics so I didn’t have the opportunity to work with many different academic perspectives until this project.
Learning to Adapt and Overcome
One skill that I have been able to improve on because of this class is my ability to thrive in group work. As I stated earlier, most of my courses here were in STEM and I often worked with people I was very familiar with or who had a similar thinking style so group work wasn’t a challenge for me. Partnering with the social work class in our CAP project, however, was a very different experience. Our team was half neurochemistry, half social work, and finding a successful way to communicate was a difficult task early on. Our initial project proposal was rejected and after reading through it, it was clear that we all understood our agreed-upon plan in a different way. We were able to pinpoint that this was a big issue early on and when we rewrote our proposal, we worked exclusively as a group and found a way to adapt to each other’s thinking and communication styles. When it came time to actually carry out the project, our communication skills and ability to work together as a team were flawless. It is so interesting to look back on this semester and see the drastic improvements we collectively made as a team. Without this course, I wouldn’t have realized that I was only good at communication with like-minded people. I learned that people from different perspectives and backgrounds have different methods of analytical thinking and learning to work with different people absolutely improves my group work abilities.
