Prepare and present, orally and in writing, to scientists in other disciplines and audiences outside the sciences.
In BIOL 288, which is the capstone for Sophomore Biology students, we were given the task of crating a general audience paper. This was the initial introduction into understanding how to delivered scientific knowledge to those who are not in scientifically dense fields. In BIOL 288, I wrote my general audience paper on Alzheimer’s Disease. This course allowed me to efficiently practice this skill while also using general audience appropriate figures that were easy to understanding and not complex.
BIOL 288 prepared me to create more general audience work that I completed in BIOL 315: Invertebrate Zoology. In this course, we learned in depth about all invertebrates, which includes a lot of information that can be tough to tackle and understand if you aren’t familiar. The main course project was to create a general audience blog about one type of invertebrate. I chose Octopus; those critters are quite unique! This allowed me to become proficient in conversing scientific knowledge and also to be creative in how I deliver the material.
Entering into my senior year, I took BIOL 450: Biology of Cancer, and this was one of the most interesting courses I had taken during my time at Longwood University. The topic of cancer is very complex, and in this course, we had several summary projects where we were tasked to create general audience projects of either posters, presentations, etc. I did one on oncogenes and another one on tumor suppressors. After the various courses that required general audience projects, I feel extremely confident in my ability to present, orally and in writing, scientific knowledge to other scientific disciplines and disciplines outside of the sciences.