Students will be able to collaborate effectively in a group setting within the discipline.

The very first thing that the biology department at Longwood has it’s students work collaboratively on projects. In BIOL 120 both of the projects in this class my peers and I had to worked together to complete the project and then to work on a presentation together. This was the very first time that I had to work collaboratively. This first project prepared me for my other foundation courses in the biology department. Each course I have taken there has been some component of teamwork or collaboration.

I believe that the foundation courses I took in the beginning of my undergraduate career prepared me to work collaboratively later on in my courses I took. One of my favorite collaborative projects that I have completed in my undergraduate career would have to be my immunology project where my group and I had to deduce what immunodeficiency our patient had. On this project myself and 2 of my peers were given a case study and we had to decide tests to run on our patient, analyze the results, and then choose how we would proceed with the results we were given. Since I took this class during a Covid period we did not participate in a traditional lab. In my opinion, since the lab was not a traditional lab it made us collaborate and talk things out more than other labs I have participated in before. I remember talking a lot to my fellow groupmates on how to proceed with lab results from tests that we had run previously. This project emphasized groupwork on a different level than I had never done before and this added to my skills as a scientist.

Overall, from freshman year to now I can say that I can work together with others and collaborate in various disciplines in the biology field. I think working collaboratively is always going to be apart of my life and the world and my experiences in undergraduate has prepared me.