Students will be able to effectively communicate orally in multiple contexts within
the discipline.
I have done a presentation in almost every biology class I have taken at Longwood. I have given presentations at Research Day, in class, and recorded myself to send into class. I have spoken about topics from amphibian crisis, protein folding, to worm habits and stimuli. It had given me a lot of skill on how to formulate my ideas and explain how and why I did things. It has also taught be pacing of speaking and emphasizing more important parts. I also have always found it very hard to explain figures in laments terms or scientifically. It was a struggle for me because I get overwhelmed when there are multiple parts and feeling like I am skipping over things or not fully explaining, but having to do it every week in my biology 425 class has helped me gain the skill of picking out the important pieces and the overall point of graphs and figures.
It takes a lot of practice to talk about different specialties especially if you are not very familiar with them, but having multiple different classes having to do this, allowed me to do it many times. This helped my skills in communicating effectively but also how to respond to questions or clarify things for those not familiar or those who want to dig deeper into my research. I appreciate this because in the future I want to work with vaccines so I will need to be able to describe to people coming from many different backgrounds to understand why something is done or how they work.