Intro to Ecology and Evolution (BIOL 251) was the first biology class I ever took at Longwood. During that course, we were responsible for coming up with our own group project. My group chose to focus on using survivorship curves to look at death rates using various factors. This was my first group project in college, and it was also my first independent research project that I had to design with my group members.
I reflect on this experience quite a bunch when I am thinking about my time here at Longwood, because I truly believe it was one of my most pivotal moments as a student. Not only did this group work and presentation introduce me to what was expected of me in undergrad, it showed me that it was possible for me to succeed in college as long as I put forth the effort. Although it went pretty smoothly, there were a few challenges. The first challenge was trying to find the information necessary for our project. Prior to Longwood, I had never researched scientific literature or even knew about resources such as the Web of Science (crazy, I know. But I do come from a very small town). It was difficult for me to understand why my peers were getting so much information on our topic while I was struggling to understand what we were even researching in the first place. I sat down with my group members and learned more about how to research the literature, and I took off from there. I was able to make major contributions to the presentation and overall felt like I was able to help our group succeed as much as we did. Another challenge I faced was that I hadn’t taken statistics since high school, and even then I only took Math 171, so the statistical knowledge needed for this presentation definitely was lacking on my part. I ended up working really hard with Dr. Leech to understand the statistics behind our research and was pretty confident. Clicking here will show you our final presentation. I was able to compile all of the graphs and my speaking part of the presentation was to discuss the survivorship curves and the statistics behind them to the group.
At the time I wasn’t sure what our lab project would help me with since it seemed like such a specific project, but I was wrong. The very next year, I was selected to work in Dr. Franssen’s lab for PRISM and I had to pull back on a lot of the knowledge I accumulated through BIOL 251. Our research focused on epigenetic heritability, so I needed to know and understand quite a bit about evolution. This class taught me the basics of evolution and allowed me to play a meaningful role in this lab. Also, the group research project we conducted helped me tremendously. My research required me to use a lot of statistics to test for significant differences in groups. Without BIOL 251, I don’t think I would have been able to live up to the expectations set in place and do as well as I did in that program. On the final poster, you can see the stats of our tests and most of those statistical analyses were done by Dr. Franssen and I.
In addition, I feel that my success in BIOL 342 (Biogeography) would not have happened without BIOL 251. For our literature review, I chose to discuss the evolution of the tree kangaroo. Without BIOL 251, I would not have been able to understand and expand upon the major principles of evolution. This paper required me to explain how tree kangaroos defied evolution, something I would not have been able to synthesize without prior knowledge and understanding of evolution. Click here to read my final literature review for biogeography.