Sometimes we like to make fun of liberal arts degrees. I may not understand my tax forms, but at least I know about quantum tunnelling! Those kinds of comments happen often. Learning about seemingly random things you never thought you were signing up for is tedious at times, but when you step back and look at what four years has done, you start to appreciate it.
During senior year, students take a capstone course as the culmination of their liberal arts education. The courses are designed to blend disparate fields of study and bring them together to deepen students’ knowledge about a topic. Capstone courses also involve cultural awareness and involvement in the local community. At Concordia, topics of capstone courses include world musics, dangerous literature, and the biochemistry of cancer. I took neurochemistry for my capstone course. Don’t worry, it was actually a lot more fun than I expected.
What do capstone courses have that others don’t? That became clear in our weekly group discussions. We would break into small groups and discuss aspects of the disease/ issue/ chemical pathway of the week. During our week on schizophrenia, a student brought up an idea from an Indian religions class. A person with schizophrenia living in India might not be avoided as a dangerous anomaly. Instead they might be treated with respectful distance or even valued as someone with a gift. Maybe the way we shun people with mental illness in America contributes to poorer outcomes for patients. In a normal neurochemistry class, no one would have ever raised that question.
When our different skills came together, our overall understanding grew tremendously. As we tried to understand a research article on addiction, students from different fields had different perspectives to give. Neuroscience majors explained the mechanisms of reward and long-term changes in the dopamine neurons of the striatum. Psychology majors told us about how the reward pathway works on a larger scale with classical conditioning and state dependent memory. Pre-med students understood that many addictions begin with prescription narcotics, and that the opioid epidemic is driven by more than individual brains, but by systemic, bureaucratic problems. With many people adding their own experiences to the pile, everyone developed a broader knowledge of the issue.
The ultimate aim, of course, is coming closer to fixing intractable diseases– of brains and of society. A sweeping, entrenched epidemic like we see with opioids can not be solved using only neuroscientists. Medications need to be prescribed by vigilant doctors and accompanied by therapy from perceptive counselors. We will need meticulous statisticians to help to manage the health of millions of people. Only social workers are able to help the families of addicts, and sometimes to heal fully you need a musician or a comedian thrown in for good measure. Before I took my capstone course I knew that teamwork would be necessary, but the course showed me how to make that teamwork happen, and how powerful a synthesis of minds can be.
Capstone Courses Are Pretty Neat
