Cobbers on the Brain

Neurochemistry  – it sounds like a lot to wrap your brain around (see what I did there), and it is. I guess I could say I had no idea what to expect for this class. I chose it because it made the most sense to fulfill the senior capstone requirement and my chemistry elective. Besides that, I had always had the desire to learn more about neuroscience, but poor planning on my part did not allow me to do this in during undergraduate education. I had missed the all important, and apparently eye-opening, meeting in the spring. So on day one, Dr. Mach says that we all should know what we’re getting ourselves into. Let’s just say my reality check about what Neurochemistry would be came about four months after everyone else.

The class was set up as discussion based, something quite foreign to my lecture style science courses. I have roommates in social work and psychology who spend their days discussing readings, but to do so for our very technical, scientific papers was daunting thought. In the end, it was a breath of fresh air to my very content heavy courses with regular homework and exams. Neurochemistry had a different routine of reading the article for the beginning of the week, researching topics to clarify information in the article, and a discussion day talking about the significance the topic had for society. Finally, we were required to summarize that week’s topic on our Cobber’s on the Brain blog.

Basically, each week we struggled to read articles to understand the details of pathways, receptors and molecules we hadn’t learned about or had just reviewed at the beginning of the semester. I can’t say I could tell you the exact mechanism for each neurological disorders we talked about, but I can say that I learned how to critically read articles. You might be thinking, “Doesn’t sound like you learned very much.”

I would say you’re wrong. I would argue that I have gained or at least strengthened a skill that I hope my undergraduate courses have been forcing me to do. I can efficiently find the important pieces of an article, look further into topics that were unfamiliar, and put the pieces together in a cohesive picture on this blog. I didn’t have a professor standing in front of the room saying “This is how it is.” Instead, I was forced to pull things out of the article, ask the right questions, find the proper resources, and come up with the bigger picture. The picture may have been mostly hypothesizing, but it still required active thinking – something that can be lacking in lecture style courses.

I wouldn’t be as confident in saying I have improved on this ability, if it weren’t for the exams. The exams required little preparation, and instead put us in the live task of reading and critically analyzing an academic article. Honestly, in the moment, I wasn’t sure whether I made any connections or whether I was pulling things out of thin air. But when I got the results of our in-class and take-home portions, it turned out that I was able to put more of the story together before my further research than I had thought.

I would say that Neurochemistry has been a good change of pace in my science heavy senior year. I was able to expand on a useful skill, break out of my comfort zone a little, and learn how to communicate about science to the general public. The Capstone experience is supposed to have an interdisciplinary component and our Friday discussions really fulfilled that. We broke out of our narrow science topic and discussed the larger impact. I think this class fulfilled the Capstone goal and was an interesting addition to one of my last semesters at Concordia.

My experience in Neurochemistry this past semester has been quite unique compared to other courses I’ve taken here at Concordia. With a very minimal background in neuroscience coming into the class, I was very worried about how I would do and how much I would be able to understand. But after building a background on a variety of topics the first couple weeks, I felt well prepared to tackle the challenging issues I would face throughout the semester. We learned all about the most recent science of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Bipolar, Migraines, and Parkinson’s, among others, by reading research articles. As we dug into our first few papers, one thing became clear to me. There is a fair amount we have learned, but there is so much more that we have yet to discover (AKA more research needs to be done, as the papers often say).
But as the semester went on, what started as an initial interest in the topics, grew into a passion for learning and understanding exactly what was going on and how researchers might approach the problem using the new information we read about in the papers. But the learning didn’t end there. At the end of each week we thoroughly discussed the societal implications of the research and the major issues, including both cultural and ethical. We also learned the importance of integration of other disciplines as the complex papers we read required knowledge of chemistry, biology, nutrition, and sometimes even sociology.
Yet perhaps the most important part of this class happened in between the research articles. Each week after discussion, we were required to write a blog post that would appear online, open to anyone to read. Now this seems like a simple task, but taking highly sophisticated, complex, and very confusing scientific research and morphing it into a manuscript that requires little to no background knowledge is quite the task. But without turning the complex ideas of science into something that can be understood by everyone really makes science completely useless. Being able to communicate science effectively is so vital to applying it to the vast array of complications it hopes to eliminate, and I’m proud to say that that is exactly what we learned in Neurochemistry.
So even though there is so much more research to be done, and at times it seems like we know a whole lot of nothing about everything, this class was not in vain. I have had a wonderful experience and have learned many skills that will be extremely useful for my future. I really can’t think of a more applicable class, for this is one that will certainly stick with me forever. I can’t think of a better way to cap off my career at Concordia.

If you had told my freshman self that I would select Neurochemistry as the capstone for the end of my college career, I probably would have requested that you undergo a psychological evaluation. And yet here I sit, nearly four years later, reflecting on a truly transformative course. I will admit, as a Psychology and Spanish double major taking the course to fulfill a Neuroscience minor, I definitely felt like the underdog. As the sole representative of the science of the mind facing a class full of pre-med, pre-pharmacy, and chemistry majors, it definitely took me awhile to feel as though I belonged there. But I believe wholeheartedly that this Capstone course captures the essence of a liberal arts education. We may possess different strengths in certain areas and have varied perspectives on an issue, but this does not make a certain background any more or less valid. We can combine our strengths to achieve a more comprehensive level of understanding from a variety of avenues. Each week, we tackled articles containing language that reminded me of the time when I briefly contemplated learning Russian. From ALS to Alzheimer’s, Bipolar Disorder to Parkinson’s, and even the controversies of cannabis, we explored the complex mechanisms behind numerous neurological conditions prevalent in society. This course allowed me to connect behavioral elements of disorders with which I am familiar to their chemical components in the brain.
The biggest lesson from this Capstone course: get comfortable with the uncomfortable. We took recent scientific discoveries and broke them down into smaller subcategories. Then, we shared our assigned topics on speed dates with each other until the topics became as familiar as a family rant about the frustrations of loving Minnesota sports teams at Thanksgiving. On Fridays, we met to discuss larger implications of the scientific findings, such as the various social issues. Should medical marijuana be legalized? Would you genetically modify your children to guarantee not passing on a life-altering condition? Finally, we posted our perspectives on the Cobbers on the Brain blog. I hope that my contributions as well as the posts of my peers have been beneficial for all of you who follow our forum.
I have thoroughly enjoyed wrestling with unfamiliarity, confronting my frustrations, and learning to adapt my strengths along with expanding my educational horizons. I plan to pursue a doctoral degree in a different avenue than my fellow comrades in Neurochem, either in Clinical Neuropsychology or Neurolinguistics, a hybrid of my love of language and the brain. Through this capstone course and my education at Concordia College, I can confidently identify as a critical reader, thinker, and a responsibly-engaged individual, possessing skills that will allow be to successfully pursue my educational and career aspirations.

No Fluff and Students Still Learn… Shocking
CHEM 475 is notoriously known as Neurochemistry at Concordia college, and if I am looking to impress my friends outside of the sciences by the rigorous classes that I am taking, I sweet talk a little “neurochemistry,” and their jaws drop. It seems that the combination of the Latin root “neuro” mixed with “chemistry” gives a killer combination for people to assume that it is an intensely difficult class.
And it is true, the topic of neurochemistry focuses on how our brain works, and we humans clearly have a long way to go until scientists have even a small grasp on understanding how our magnificent minds conduct their daily business. But, in the meantime, students that are ambitious to uncover the secrets of our own brains, like me, must begin to tackle the problem by learning what is known. This is the point of the neurochemistry class: to gain an understanding and appreciation for what is currently known about brain. In addition, over the course of the semester we attempted to develop problem solving skills that prompt us to ask leading questions that need to be answered in order to accomplish this task.
But the intriguing thought is that this was by far the most simplistic course of the entire semester. How you might ask? How could a topic as difficult as neurochemistry come to be my easiest class? And if it was so easy, surely I must have learned nothing? In order to learn and retain information, the course must be academically challenging, right?
If you asked these questions, do not be ashamed; they are logical questions to ask that our societal norms continually reinforce. But as I have considered these questions in respect to this class, I have found that I was quite naïve in my understanding of what is necessary in order to learn.
The curriculum of neurochemistry works like this. Over the weekend, everyone in the class reads a brief (yet technically dense) scientific article about a certain brain disease, such as Alzheimer disease, migraines, obesity, or Parkinson disease. On Monday, we discuss what we did not fully understand, and each student is assigned a topic to look into for the upcoming class period. On Wednesday, we share these new pieces of information with each other to further our knowledge of the topic. Finally, on Friday, we simply come together to have a free discussion about the topic that may cover ethics, chemistry, disease, or even social standards surrounding the disease.
Outside of class, there is very little homework, and there is virtually no “study time” required for the class. With the exception of reading the article and examining one topic, all learning occurs within the classroom. Commonly, the standard “lecture-based” class involves a massive emulsion of information that is presented in a word-vomit style. This requires the student to take hours outside of class to sift through and organize the information into carefully packaged parcels of memorized concepts. Contradictory to this method of teaching, a discussion-based class in which the information is mutually foreign to the students AND PROFESSOR fosters the connection of bigger ideas during the class period. Thus, the information is still present, but in order to have successful discussion, the ideas must be collimated in the minds of the students during class rather than waiting until “the night before an exam” to actually learn the information.
As a busy student, myself, (and to be frankly honest, there simply is no such thing as a student that is not busy) the worst thing that a professor can do is to force multitudes of what I like to call FLUFF as requirements for the students. Fluff, in essence is trivial work that is meant to keep the student busy and thinking about the class. This type of work has little academic merit and is more or less mindless. Although fluff may contribute somewhat to the student’s learning, it is not as efficient as other methods of studying─ and I would go as far to say that cramming would even be more useful than fluff.
By limiting the amount of fluff (i.e. work to be done outside of class), learning occurs in the class, and the time that student’s consider to be valuable is not wasted. Efficiency is a virtue, and I am a strong proponent that if the student is focused and ready to learn during class, then the professor should at least keep in mind that assigning extra fluff may not be necessary.
Of course, pedagogy is a difficult subject, and there is no single best method to teach. In fact, teaching styles need to be tailored specifically to each class as the variability in curriculum and aptitude of the students will certainly influence the way that the class should be taught. However, in general, I believe that professors should strongly consider if the assignments that they give outside of class really are of benefit to the student or if they should be eliminated as fluff.
Neurochemistry has been a perfect example of this. I applaud Dr. Julie Mach for being mindful of student time by eliminating entirely the fluff. In this minimalist perspective, we have stripped the class to a barebones ensemble of discussions, and still, we students have found the motivation to pursue the academic rigor with which we are so familiar. In accordance with the mission of Concordia College, we are becoming thoughtful and engaged men and women dedicated to influencing the affairs of the world─ we just did it faster…
Final thoughts on neurochemistry written by Steven Dotzler

In order to satisfy the requirements to graduate at Concordia you must take a capstone class.  The goal of this class is to wrap up our education and allow us to realize how much we have matured and grown in understanding as students.  For me neurochemistry was the capstone class I elected to take.  This was a very unique class that had an interesting curriculum.  It deterred from the usual class structure in which the professor lectures and the students memorize.  This class was instead set up purely as a group discussion class in which the students taught each other the material they were going over in the current articles about neurological diseases.  Since the articles where recent and very detailed it meant that the professor was learning the material at the same time as the students.
It is because of this unique learning environment that I was able to see how much I have grown as a student since I entered college as that nervous freshmen and have become a confident senior.  Throughout much of college if I didn’t understand the material the professor was there to explain it to me.  As I climb the ladder of education I realize that there are fewer people around who can answer the complicated questions I am beginning to ask.  This class demonstrated how well Concordia has molded me with the capacity to collaborate with other students so that together we can find the answers to those difficult questions.  Each article we would read would leave almost the entire class confused on the first day, but as we discussed the areas we were struggling with and brought our own unique individual understandings we were able to paint a picture of what was being discussed in the article.  This class not only found importance in learning very detailed pathways about brain disorders, but also focused on being able to share that knowledge with the general public.  That is a major flaw that many scientists like me struggle with, talking like normal human beings.  It was a great learning experience to write a blog that took the complicated issues we were dealing with and turn them into simplified summaries that allowed the public to learn about the new progress with these hot topic diseases without leaving them more confused than when they started reading.
This class has shown me that the more I yearn to learn and seek out knowledge, the more I will realize that I am only scratching the surface on these interesting yet complicated issues.  It has shown me that it is alright to not know the answer right away because we have been taught the fundamentals that allow us to find the answer.  One of the best parts of this experience was having a very close knit class that has known each other for almost four years now.  We were able to find a nice balance between joking and learning.  It created an environment that was both enjoyable and worth while.

At Concordia College, part of the core curriculum is taking a “capstone” course. This course is supposed to “cap-off” our liberal arts learning experience and further instill the idea of BREWing (becoming responsibly engaged in the world) in our lives.
Neurochemistry was my capstone course.
I took the class largely because I was required to for my major. Even had it not been required I would have still taken the course due to it being one of the few science-based capstone courses. My reasoning for taking the course would have been solely due to the fact that I could easily understand the material since I am a Biochemistry major.
I would have never guessed how much I would learn and how important this class would be to my liberal arts experience.
Neurochemistry was unlike any course I have ever taken in college. While I did learn new and interesting scientific material like I have in other classes, what I really took away from the class was the ability to think critically about scientific literature and apply problem solving skills to real life issues.
As we read articles about neurological diseases, we always tried to keep in mind bigger, societal issues with these diseases and how our newfound knowledge may help problem solve. Key to the class was our class discussions that occurred every Friday. These discussions helped to solidify the material in the article but also to brainstorm ideas with classmates about how neurological diseases affect society and how science can contribute. Usually, I am not a fan of discussion-based classes (heresy at a liberal arts school), but I found these discussions actually worth my time and I looked forward to hearing what classmates had to say about the material.
One of the most valuable portions of the class was the type of tests we took. The tests were less about regurgitating material and more about thinking critically. We could not just memorize and repeat information but had to read clues about an article and hypothesize what was happening in a disease. This portion helped me to really piece together portions of information and come up with a coherent argument about what I thought was happening. The second portion of the test was to read the actual article and evaluate our own hypothesis.
I had never heard of a test like this before neurochemistry. It was a nice change of pace that was actually more applicable to real life. In real life, you don’t get “tested” on whether or not you have memorized formulas or definitions or whether or not you have names and dates correct. Your “test” comes in thinking critically and problem solving. Your “test” is when you are given a little information and required to come up with solution on the spot or shortly thereafter.
The material I learned in neurochemistry may or may not come up later on in my life (as a future physician it will likely come up), but what I gained from the class was not new facts, but deeper thinking. I gained the ability to think critically about scientific literature and apply new knowledge to important problems and to think about how the larger society might be affected by what I study. That, I believe, is an important “cap” to my liberal arts experience here at Concordia College.

Concordia College Moorhead being a liberal arts institution requires its students to take classes outside of the desired area of study we have chosen for ourselves. For a science major such as myself, classes such as writing, religion or a speech are examples. As a final requirement before a student graduates, we have to take a class that fulfills a “capstone” requirement. This class wraps up our time at Concordia and as well as the goals the college had for us during our time here. The course I chose to fulfill this capstone requirement  was this Neurochemistry class. The class was unlike any class I have ever taken. And I loved it.
In both large and small college institutions, the normal lecture class consists of a professor rambling on continuously about a subject, maybe a quarter of the kids paying attention and trying to keep up with notes while the rest are sitting there dumbfounded wondering what the heck is going on. That was not the case when it came to this Neurochemistry class. Not only were we collaborating as a class talking about disorders and the science behind them everyday, but our professor was right there learning with us. The way the class worked was over the weekend we were assigned to read a fairly new review article about a specific disorder and bring questions to class about things we didn’t know or understand. It was very common that we would come to class on Mondays looking like a bunch of deer in headlights because we only understood bits and pieces of the entire scientific paper. But then, we tackled it together. Each person was assigned a specific topic from the paper to research for class Wednesday, and on Wednesdays we would “speed date” and teach our topic to the rest of the class in a one-on-one format. Having now understood (hopefully) the bulk of the paper, Fridays were set aside to talk about the disorder and everything from how its affecting society to what should be done next. Fridays were my favorite days because I was not only able to share my opinions about a disorder, but it also gave me time to listen to my peers and their take on what was going on. Once our week on a specific disorder was over, we were then required to share our thoughts on the disorder as well as the science behind it to the rest of the world in the form of a blog post. The entire process would start all over with a different disorder the following week.
I felt like this was the first class that I have taken as an undergraduate student that exposed me to what the real scientific world is like.  I say this because science is all about collaboration. Whether that is collaborating to solve a common problem or collaborating to answer a question out of pure curiosity, there is a lot of dialogue between scientists. In this class, all that we did was collaborate. We worked to better understand a paper and disorder that none of us fully understood. With patience we were able to pull together to understand what it was saying. It was a great and new feeling to know that we all really were on the same level with the material and we were able to help each other out to understand it. As a class, we were also able to relay our new information about a disorder to the general public by writing blog posts about them. This too is apart of the scientific world that is not always easy because science is not an easy subject to understand.
I don’t know what this class would have been like if anyone besides our professor Dr. Julie Mach was teaching it. She made sure we knew that it was ok not to understand something and that she wasn’t going to completely understand everything either. The semester before the class begun, Dr. Mach organized a meeting for everyone that had signed up for the class. It was during this meeting that she made it very clear that we needed to be okay with not knowing everything that we needed to be okay talking about science especially the science we didn’t understand. I find this a really important aspect of a capstone class because never are we ever going to understand everything in life once we are on our own and we need to be okay admitting this. It was a breath of fresh air having a class that I went to three days a week in which I was involved in and that I was comfortable enough in to both express my questions and opinions about a disorder. Dr. Mach primed the class in which this was made possible.
In my opinion Neurochemistry was the epitome of a capstone class at Concordia College Moorhead. I loved learning about the disorders we talked about each week, I was able to link the topics directly to society as a whole, my classmates became new friends, it let me practice transmitting scientific information to the rest of the world and it taught me that it was okay not to know everything. I believe this class has prepared me for what the real world of science is like and was the perfect way to “cap off” my career as a Concordia College Student.

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For my last blog post I get the pleasure to describe my experience in neurochemistry.  This class has been the most unique chemistry course I have taken in my time at Concordia.  Its style, content, and approach are exciting and refreshing in many ways.
First off, the style of neurochemistry was incredibly different from my other chemistry courses. This class is run in a discussion based format, which to be honest I was not a fan of before the start of the class.  I found my other discussion based classes at Concordia (outside the sciences) greatly disappointing. My experience with discussion based classes was that it is not necessarily a format where the professor shares their experience and knowledge, but where they merely facilitate discussion that should lead to learning. I understand that this is how a lot of people prefer to learn but I really just love a good lecture where a professor shovels an incredible amount of information onto you and leaves you to make the deeper, more subtle connections in the material.  Neurochemistry however, finally achieved what a discussion based course should be, in my opinion.  Dr. Mach, our fearless leader, made it clear from the beginning that she was going to bring what she could to the class but that the class format would make it so that she was more of a colleague than a professor.  We spent our time reading cutting-edge scientific research that no one, not even the professor, initially understood.  We then had to collaborate to elucidate what the authors were trying to make clear and then, most importantly, assess where the scientific research could go from its current state.
Last year I was lucky enough to receive a position as an organic chemist for a laboratory here in Fargo.  My supervisor has a PhD and many of my coworkers have advanced degrees of their own. When I joined this team I learned very quickly what it was like to be a scientist in the real world. No longer was I a student and had to have mastery over every aspect of a subject. No longer did I need to know everything.  I joined the team with a specific set of skills and unique knowledge to contribute. At my job we tackle problems and run experiments of incredibly varied types.  No one that I work with knows everything about what is going on, and we all have to work well together to make advances.  This is what real world science looks like.  Discoveries are made by teams of unique individuals who contribute their niches of knowledge to solve a problem. Watson and Crick, the two researchers who first elucidated the structure of DNA, needed a keen organic chemist to describe a chemical process for them to finally connect the two strands of thought they were struggling with.
This is why it has been such a pleasure and so much fun to experience a class that finally captures what real life science looks like.  It has been a powerful, and humbling, experience to watch my peers and myself tackle complex diseases and problems and come away with a greater understanding for these terrible diseases that afflict our families, friends, and neighbors.
For me, neurochemistry is a launching pad for my scientific career.  I am hoping to go to graduate school and attain a PhD in chemistry.  My professional life will likely be carried out in this similar format for many many years.  For many of my peers however, this will be the only time they experience scientific collaboration like this.  This doesn’t cheapen their experience in any way though, as I am sure that physicians and health professionals collaborate in a similar manner.
What an opportunity we have had to experience this collaborative format in our undergraduate studies! And thanks go to you, the reader, for coming along for the ride.