Before beginning my capstone experience in Neurochemistry, I was very curious as to how this would be different from any other class. I imagined all of the chemistry behind what I learned in my previous neuroscience courses would clarify everything, and it would all suddenly make sense. As the semester progressed, I realized that some of the things I hadn’t understood before were indeed starting to make more sense, but it became more and more apparent that I would never get to the point where I would truly feel as if I fully understood everything. Now, as the semester comes to a close, I realize that in many ways, this is part of the beauty of science: though we will continue to constantly try and learn more, there will still always be more to discover, just as there will always be more I myself can learn. The way we learned in this course was very different than anything I’ve ever experienced in any of my other classes, and seems to be very appropriate given that my classmates and I will all be leaving Concordia perhaps sooner than we fully appreciate, and it will start to fall upon us more and more to take responsibility for our own learning. In this class, we didn’t sit and listen to a lecture during every class period, but instead we looked at articles regarding recent research in neurochemistry, and then worked as a class to dissect and look for the aspects of the article we didn’t understand. We would then seek out more information, and bring it to class to share with everyone else, and finally at the end of the week, we would sit and discuss the article and some of its implications. It seems as if this is a much more realistic way of learning information than sitting in a classroom, and this experience gave us a much more realistic picture of how we must continue to be life-long learners.
To be totally honest, I don’t know whether I will remember in five years what Akt does and all of the different pathways it can impact, but some of the broader themes of the course are ones I will surely carry with me. We learned many different things about obesity, endocannabinoids and marijuana, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and concussions. Several things struck me as we studied these diseases and their related neurochemical mechanisms. First of all, the mechanism for any one of these diseases is by no means simple. We usually would study one or two aspects of it as they pertained to the article we were looking at that week, and then through our research as we tried to understand the article better, found several other pathways that might also play a role, or contribute in some form. Secondly, I came to understand how much public opinion can do to mask the science behind certain things. I am speaking with endocannabinoids and marijuana in mind, as I discovered that there are certainly substantial potential medical benefits that may be a result of the use of cannabis, and these benefits had previously seemed almost mythical to me and simply an argument people used as they were trying to legalize marijuana. I also learned about how important some small changes we make in our lives can make a huge difference. From drinking a cup of green tea every so often to working to develop better diet and exercise habits, the smaller changes can make a huge difference in both the future health of both yourself and your children. It has become apparent that there is no wonder-drug, and that side-effects are sometimes unavoidable when you are trying to treat one thing without throwing other systems out of balance. It suddenly makes a lot more sense why we spend so much time trying to learn more about disease and develop a treatment for it, but often are still unable to find a perfect solution. This class has taught me to think critically about a lot of things that I might have taken at face value before, and overall, has taught me to be more inquisitive about the world around me, which is perhaps one of the most useful things I can take away from a course.
What are we really learning about in college?
