Concordia College prides itself on preparing its students for the real world after their undergraduate experience, and the capstone experience is supposed to be the final addition to the recipe. As my final semester at Concordia is wrapping up and I finish my capstone course, Neurochemistry, I believe I can say that Concordia is doing it right. I hope that I can say the same thing 20 years from now, too, but from where I am now I can.
Concordia has a list of goals for liberal learning that they try to incorporate into their liberal arts education, and at the same time they try to teach the students to become engaged in the world around them. I feel as though Neurochemistry has met these criteria.
The first goal for liberal learning is to instill a love for learning. Although this class has been challenging and a bit confusing at times, the material has been fascinating. I hadn’t taken a neuro class before this, so I thought I might be a little behind and easily overwhelmed. This may have been the case if it was a typical class, but, because we had to learn the material on our own outside of class, I could spend as much time as I needed. It was easy to spend a lot of time understanding some of the articles, but they were so interesting it didn’t matter.
The second goal is about developing skills and transferable intellectual capacities. I think that this goal was probably the most relevant to me because I am going into dentistry, which is a constantly evolving field. I will need to be able to pick up a scientific article years from now have the skills necessary to critically analyze and understand its content, something that I learned reading articles and discussing them in this class.
Developing an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives and their connections is the third goal of liberal learning. Our class had people from many backgrounds, majors, and countries, so we had people with different perspectives weighing in on our discussions. In addition, Dr. Mach did a wonderful job of bringing things to our attention that we maybe didn’t think of or that enhanced our discussion in some other way. Our topics were controversial at times (legalization of marijuana, end of life care, drug addiction, etc.), so it was interesting to see where people were coming from when they had a contrasting opinion.
The fourth goal is to cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical and spiritual self-understanding. Neurochemistry satisfied this goal through our class discussions. We were never just memorizing information from a lecture given by our professor. We were asking questions about the implications of a new discovery, discussing if a new treatment option was ethical or not, comparing our views to those of another culture, or looking inside ourselves to formulate our own opinions. Many of us will be professionals in medicine or a related field, so we will face these kinds of issues at some point and will need to deal with it properly.
The final goal of liberal learning is to encourage responsible participation in the world. Our weekly blog posts relaying scientific information to the public were an obvious way that we were participating in the world. In our discussions, we often found ourselves saying, “If only more people knew (fill in the blank).” Because we have the educational background and access to scientific articles, it is our responsibility to do what we can to educate others to make informed decisions.
Overall, this class was a great experience and I would recommend it to any science student that is looking for a capstone. It is challenging, yes, but it is an awesome class and is near the top of my list of engaging, interesting, and rewarding classes here at Concordia.
Concordia College Capstone Experience
