Concordia and me
In high school, I never thought I would pick Concordia College for the next four years of my education. It was really the people here that drew me into picking the school. I remember visiting schools across the nation and thinking I do not want to stay this close to home, so I don’t need to look at Concordia. I don’t know how or why I did look into Concordia, but the community caught my attention. I got the opportunity to talk to a professor and it really struck me that those small classrooms, close connections to my professor and peers are what I wanted. Throughout my years here now, I have really seen myself learn and grow through not only the curriculum, but also the community within the science department and outside of it too.
Concordia has five goals set in place for the liberal learning experience here on campus. The first is to instill a love for learning. There were definitely classes that I thought were brutal and I won’t lie, it was stressful keeping up sometimes. At the end of the day, however, I was always beyond impressed by how much I found myself learning about so many different topics. Neuroscience was just a major that I thought would be fun to learn about, but I can say all my neuroscience classes were by far my most favorite and I loved learning in every single one of them. I ended up adding a Biology major because why not learn more in more areas!?
The second goal is to develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities. All of my classes have always been so hands on and discussion based where I feel like I gained skills that would be applicable to real life. The labs especially taught me a large varieties of skills including teamwork, problem solving, scientific reasoning, etc. My environmental and global studies classes were also important I thought to me because they gave me more knowledge of real world issues that I otherwise may have been ignorant about.
The third goal to develop an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and intercultural perspectives and their connections. While I love my major specific classes, I really liked the well rounded aspect of the liberal learning here at Concordia that allows me to take classes of different subjects as well. I feel like I know so much more about the world and everything out there. My Spanish and inquiry classes especially we got to go out in the communities and talk to people and that was very cool! In my inquiry, we got to go to the New American Consortium and work with people of different cultural backgrounds, which was one of my favorite experiences right off the bat coming into college. These experiences in such classes I thought also really pushed for the fifth goal which is to encourage responsible participation in the world. The clubs and activities also added to my growth in these areas, especially when I was on the DEIC executive committee board. That role was especially fun because I got to really learn about different culture’s celebrations in order to recreate them here on campus. I think this also helped with the fourth goal: Cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding. I think I learned more about myself and the diverse group of people around me through my experiences at Concordia.
This semester and me
This semester was one of my favorites because I think I learned about so many diverse subjects in my classes. Neurochemistry was one of my favorites in my entire college career because of the design of the class being so discussion heavy. In this class I felt like I could use prior knowledge from many of my classes to analyze real life health conditions affecting people in the world. Once we problem solved understanding research articles and the brain pathways causing a variety of illnesses, we could dig deeper into the subject. It was not always just straight science. The open ideas structure really allowed us to learn about so much more like environmental impacts on health or psychological or food or the government and societal stigma. The topics were endless and I loved that lack of restriction in class.
The amount of information and just analyzing skills I have gained from reading, understanding, and discussing so many articles will for sure help me in my career path to becoming a doctor. I think any career, including the ones in healthcare, need skills that involve investigating what is wrong and how it can be fixed. We did this a lot with so many different health conditions throughout the semester. Knowing how these health conditions are formed was really interesting and will be impactful in the future when I may have patients who have many of these.
The discussion-based format of Neurochemistry also played such a huge role in the friendships I have strengthened after the class. Instead of just sitting next to strangers for a semester and listening to lectures, we got to talk to each other and hear so many perspectives of people with so many different backgrounds. We even started hanging out outside of class, which we had never done before this class (as seen in the top featured picture).
