The main goals of liberal learning include the development of a love for learning along with a deep understanding of how what you learn can impact both interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary understanding. These goals are meant to enable students to draw connections across academic boundaries while promoting connections to the world outside academia to enrich the lives of those who our knowledge might help. In my four years at Concordia College, I have never experienced a class more suited to these goals than Neurochemistry.
At first glance, Neurochemistry appears to be yet another science course offered at Concordia. With an emphasis on developing an understanding of remarkably complex neural pathways involved in neurological diseases, Neurochemistry explores the brain’s circuitry to better understand how these diseases are developed and how they might eventually be cured.
However, there is something that sets this course apart from many other courses offered at Concordia. While a goal of the class is to delve into the world of neurochemisty and all of its complexities, there is another purpose beyond simple content mastery. After learning the ins and outs of the science behind a particular disease, a discussion is opened as to how this new understanding can impact the world outside of neurochemistry. The focus is not to sequester the information we understand within the scientific community, but to share and spread what we have learned with the public at large to foster a better understanding of what we have learned.
Between blog posts, public service announcements, and cross-disciplinary discussions, this course has showed me the importance of widening the base of impact that scientific discoveries can have. Too often, novel scientific discoveries are limited to a highly devoted scientific population without much consideration for how the public at large could understand what has been discovered. A goal of this course was to distill that information into a form that makes available the impact of current research and discuss how these findings could lead to changes for the better in the lives of people.
The motto I’ve heard consistently at Concordia is an importance to BREW, or become responsibly engaged in the world. Neurochemistry has shown me both what is currently lacking and what could result from a scientific community more in tune with responsible engagement in the world.
A Capstone Experience
