Students should be able to integrate physics and chemistry concepts into relevant biological contexts.
At Longwood, one of the main goals is making sure students are well-rounded as an academic. Part of the way Longwood accomplishes this is through allowing students to use different scientific topics, such as Physics and Chemistry, within the Biology curriculum. They also require students to become sufficient in topics such as chemistry and physics taken as its own course. This is because integrating these concepts with biological concepts is crucial in understanding scientific concepts as a whole. Because of this, I have learned how to apply and critically analyze the major principles of chemistry and physics through taking Introduction to Ecology and Evolution as well as
During my Introduction to Ecology to Evolution course, we were assigned to analyze and reflect on several journal articles. For this assignment we had to define unknown terms, provide overall summary points, an explanation of how this article related to other scientific topics, the applications and implications of the article, our personal evaluation of the article, and questions we had about the article. This assignment allowed me to integrate chemical scientific topics into this ecology paper through the explanation of photosynthesis and an example analogy. This article’s reflection can be found below.
Throughout my Vertebrate Physiology course, we were assigned with writing several “Inside JEB’s” which were general audience summaries of journal articles. For these assignments we were able to choose whichever articles we wanted. One of the articles that I chose was about songbirds and if they can tell the difference between the songs of related birds (within their community) and unknown birds (outside their community). This assignment allowed me to analyze the concept of various pitches being used throughout the songs of songbirds, which relates to the understanding of pitches and sound waves in physics. This Inside JEB summary can be found below.
These courses as well as others played a part in allowing me to become a well-rounded academic. Integrating biology with chemistry and physics has shown to be for good reason as it has allowed me to explore connections between these concepts that I would have not without assignments such as the ones included above.