Organismal biology is something I really enjoy learning because you can learn the structure and function of a variety of organisms from all around the world. It specifically studies how the structure and function influence ecological and evolutionary changes over a period of time. Human anatomy and physiology I and II were my favorite organismal biology classes at Longwood University. Unfortunately, we never did any presentations or lab reports in class so I don’t have any artifact from that class to put on this page of my ePortfolio. In that class I learned all of the bones and muscles in the human body. I had multiple experiences with dissecting specific parts of animals which included the eye and heart. Learning how to dissect specific parts of the body really helped me in my tumor immunology research where I had to dissect multiple mice spleens to retrieve T cells.
The two artifacts I picked out for this page was a paper from Conservation Biology (Biol. 330) about the decreasing population density of the Florida Panther and a presentation about the structure, function, and evolution of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from Microbiology (Biol. 305). In my conservation biology lab report, the research indicated many reasons as to why increased human activity has contributed to the Florida Panther population decrease over the 20th and 21st centuries. I really learned a lot by doing this project and taking this course here at Longwood University. I had no idea that the Florida Panther existed until that lab report. The class also taught me about many other organisms that were extinct or close to extinction that I did not know about beforehand. Conservation Biology is something I am not interested in career-wise but I feel like it was good experience to take this class to get exposed to the topic.
I enjoyed taking microbiology last semester because it was a very hands-on class with very interesting material about different bacteria and their functions. We were all assigned a different bacterium to research and make a PowerPoint on. It was my favorite two weeks of the class listening to everyone’s presentation because they all so interesting and I learned so much then if I would have if I just had to read a textbook about them. I think taking microbiology will be helpful for me in the future where I pursue a career in a research lab. No matter what I research, the techniques I learned in microbiology lab like sterilization will be expected of me when I am working.