Before my junior year of college, I transferred schools; hence this section's title. From this point on in my college career, I attended Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. I was accepted into the Honors Program at this school. The coursework displayed below comes from my honors classes during my third year of college.
Solving Environmental Problems - In this honors course, I picked an environmental problem at the beginning of the semester dealing with the developed world. The problem I chose was excessive waste production. During the length of the semester, I wrote five papers over this issue. The first paper dealt with defining the problem at hand and explaining why it is a problem. My second and third paper both evaluated solutions which have already been made to solve this problem; one paper focused on how the problem had been "solved" at an international level, while the other focused on how the problem was "solved" at a local level. The fourth paper proposed my own idea on how individuals could act in order to help solve the issue of excessive waste production and my fifth paper introduced an idea on how to solve my problem using governmental methods. This course helped me understand that while our world faces very daunting environmental problems, there are achievable and feasible options in solving them. The paper displayed to the right is my fifth paper; it proposes a governmental plan to solve the problem of excessive waste production at a local level, in Springfield, Missouri (where my college is located).
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Honors Reading Seminar: Culture and Inequality - This course focused on current issues related to inequality and cultural problems. At the beginning of this class, classmates and I created a list of which books we would be reading throughout the semester that covered those two topics. After reading each book, our class would meet and critically discuss and analyze the book and how it relates to the world we live in. Each book discussion was lead by a few students. Following the discussion, each leader produced a response to the text. To the left is my response after reading the book Adios, America! by Ann Coulter. This book focused on illegal immigration in the United States. Our class decided to read this book due to current political issues surrounding the 2016 election. This book in particular was chosen because the author held a very strong opinion against illegal immigration; as a student at a liberal arts college, I had previously been exposed to experiences and literature related to illegal immigration, including why it occurs and primary source material from illegal immigrants telling their stories. Because of this, I was inquisitive to read a book that argued the opposite case of what I had already been exposed to. After reading this book, I decided to relate my response to the quality of the argument the author made.
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Junior Seminar I - During this course, one of our major tasks was to develop a 12-15 minute presentation over any biological topic of interest. For this project, I chose to present over White Nose Syndrome. For me, this topic was very personal as the cave at the state park I worked at for two summers has this disease. Due to the disease, the cave's bat population had dwindled from nearly 400 bats to less than 10. During my tours, I would discuss White Nose Syndrome with my visitors, but I had never dived into the full physiological effects of the disease on the bats nor exactly why the disease was as lethal to bats as it is. This presentation furthered my knowledge of a very prevalent, deadly disease causing the decline of bat populations nation wide. It also increased my awareness and interest in conversation methods and studies going on to hopefully stop the dramatic decline of bat populations in the United States.
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Honors Comedy - Throughout this course, our class spent time analyzing comedy, its purpose, its history, its theories, and how it works. We even performed our own skits (in public) which we produced ourselves. One of my favorite projects during this course was producing our own research proposal related to humor in any scholarly discipline. The document to the left is the proposal I produced. This proposal aims to determine how effective disciplinary humor is when used by teachers on junior high school students. As I have a strong interest in education, I decided to focus on students and teaching methods. When performing my initial brainstorming research, I stumbled upon the idea of disciplinary humor and was fascinated by it. After analyzing prime literature, I found an aim for a study which would combine teaching/educating with disciplinary humor, and my research proposal came to life. The ultimate goal of this project was to become familiar with analyzing prime literature and creating research proposal; thus, aspects such as budget and participation were not of concern in this proposal.
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Junior Seminar II - This course focused on familiarizing students with the process of creating and presenting a grant proposal. The mock research proposal I created (displayed on the right) focuses on my previous interest in White Nose Syndrome, a lethal bat disease sweeping across North America. I decided to focus my research on this topic due to my personal experience with the disease. Previously, I worked as a naturalist at a Missouri state park for two summers. At the park, I spend many days giving cave tours, but rarely saw any bats within the cave. While there used to be hundreds of bats in the cave I worked at, White Nose Syndrome wiped out all bat populations. In fact, I saw less than five bats inside that cave during those two summers. This experience pushed my interest to increase knowledge about the disease and possible solutions. My research investigates the fitness of White Nose Syndrome-infected little brown bats, Myotis lucifugus, when treated with a known inhibitor of White Nose Syndrome, Pantoea ananatis. Within the proposal, the background for the study, review of literature, methods, and budget can be found.
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Herpetology - This course is one of my passions. While I used to be afraid of snakes, I took herpetology to get past this irrational fear, and I am truly glad that I did. This course not only got me past me fear, but also allowed me to admire snakes. Within a few weeks, I was able to pick up a snake from the wild and let it wonder around my arms as I analyzed it. Furthermore, the class enabled me to unearth my obsession for salamanders. These skin-breathing organisms stole a piece of my heart and a great deal of my attention (Just look at those guys! How could they not?). Along with these breakthroughs, herpetology takes on a field component, during which, students are in the field identifying and finding all sorts of amphibian and reptilian critters. One of my favorite aspects of the class was learning how to photograph herps while in the field! The slideshow playing to the left displays only a minute portion of the ectothermic creatures I captured (by hand and camera) during the course. Please feel free to watch and admire these neat animals.
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