Freshman Year
During my first semester in the fall of 2017, I was a part of an Honors Reading Seminar with a few other students. Our group's theme during the semester was Social Justice Issues. We read controversial books about different problems in society and discussed them once a month. Our topics included child prostitution, racism, immigration, and cultural deviance. One of the books we read was Girls Like Us by Rachel Lloyd. Check out the critique I wrote about Lloyd's captivating and heart-wrenching story.
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I took a Social Justice Seminar in the spring of 2018. In this class, we examined different theories of social justice from people like Amartya Sen and John Rawls. We also discussed what social justice really means to us and what it means to fight for justice and change the world. It was my favorite class that semester because I loved being involved in all of the discussions about justice and leadership.
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Sophomore Year
After I decided on my major, Biology (BS), I began to crack down on the rest of my core requirements and lower-level classes for my major/minor. I did not take any upper level Honors Classes, which is what I am dedicating the rest of this page to.
Junior Year
During the fall of 2019, I completed my Senior Seminar 1 for my Biology BS major. The class involved completing practicum hours/field work related to my major and then writing a research paper about a topic related to my degree and potential future field of study. I chose the effect of parasitic trematodes on limb development of frogs in North America. The practicum hours/field work was the time I spent teaching science at Cub Creek Science Camp. At the camp, a camper in my Pond Study course found a frog with six (6) legs! (pictured right) I was so intrigued because I had never seen anything like it, so that is what I decided to base my research off of. The research I completed for the paper was so incredibly interesting, I loved it! (and I found so many great sources) Hopefully, I will be doing my own actual field research.
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The spring of 2020 brought more honors courses as well as the horrific Coronavirus global pandemic. I had the pleasure of taking Immunology and Medical Botany with two incredible professors who found ways to make learning the course material very interesting after everything moved online for the second half of the semester. Between Zoom video chats with my class mates and independent research, I still felt fulfilled in my education. I researched the medicinal advantages of Aloe vera plants in Medical Botany and learned about the vital phytochemicals in hundreds of different types of plants. In Immunology, I spent a large portion of the semester comparing and contrasting the 1918 Influenza global pandemic with the current COVID 19 global pandemic (I could rant about it forever now!)