Since my first semester here at Longwood, I’ve discovered I really love chemistry, to the point where I added it as a minor, and I wish I had just double majored. My first course centered on chemistry was CHEM 111, and it basically was just a review of everything I had learned in high school. I’ve also taken two semester of organic chemistry and honestly I am not even going to talk about those classes because I loathed them. I was one of the unlucky who never understood what was happening. But then I took two semester of biochemistry and that went much better. In biochemistry, we essentially learned the relationship between biology and chemistry everyday, and how the two coexists, mainly through the metabolic processes within the body. For instance, I learned about the Krebs Cycle, glycolysis and the electron transport chain all over again, and how they are all interconnected. These processes are taught in man biology courses, as these processes are responsible for ATP synthesis, which keep us and our cellular activities functioning. For our final, we were had draw a metabolic map of how the three were connected, and I decided to sketch it out before my final drawing.

During the two semesters of my junior year, I took PHYS 120 and 121. PHYS 120 was definitely more physics based, and there wasn’t really any connections made to biology that were pointed out during the class. It wasn’t until PHYS 121 that our professor showed the more applicable side to physics outside of just physics, such as how it relevant in the medical field. I definitely was intrigued to learn about this applications since I want to be doctor and I for sure need to understand physics for the MCAT! The main connection that was made was electricity and the human heart, and how advancements in physics technology has allowed for the creation of pacemakers, electrocardiograms, and automated external defibrillators that can help with heart failure and coronary artery disease. I also learned about how the heart works and how crucial properly using electricity is in rebooting the heart and keeping it working. Overall it was really cool to learn about and see how the two sciences work hand in hand.

In my senior year I took quantitative analysis, my final chemistry class! This one was definitely one of my more challenging classes, there was just so much math involved! But lucky for me I love math, and I found that much of what I learned was a repeat from CHEM 211. The only difference was that this course was much more in depth, with some problems taking me a whole page to solve. Quantitate analysis was a lot of what the name says basically, analyzing numbers and what they mean. This ranged from determining morality, doing titrations and titration curves, to polyprotic acid/base problems and equilibrium, just to name a few. As for the application in biological contexts, that really shone through in lab. Our final lab project was to determine the concentration of nitrate in aqueous solutions. Nitrate in high levels in the environment can lead to polluted waterways and eutrophication, which is where a significant increase in aquatic plant growth, such as algae, results in the creation of “dead zones.” Excess nitrate is also harmful to human health when we consume nitrate from sources like processed meats, possibly leading to breast and bladder cancer. We examined natural sources of nitrate, such a leafy greens, and compared concentration levels. So while the process was chemistry based, knowing how to analyze and quantify nitrate is super important for understanding ecosystems and how development may be impeded on. Looking back on the class, while it was a lot of studying and math, I really do miss it now, I really love when equations do what they’re supposed to and patterns make sense!