Throughout this course, I’ve learned how to be more observant about the skills and techniques that I use. Most of the time, we go through working through projects without acknowledging the amount of technique and skills it takes to simply make an observation or analyzation. Both of the projects worked on throughout the course actually made you think about what skills you used in order to produce the work we presented in the end.

I found that BioBlitz was the project that introduced me to realizing the amount of skills we used in order to make our observations throughout the event. With this in mind, I would say that it was impactful, especially when it came to understanding the Scientific Method. Although this event did made me realize this, it wasn’t my favorite, possibly due to the fact that I’m not the biggest fan of science. I did, however, really enjoy the healthcare innovation assignment. I am more of a creative person so being able to think and design our own invention was something very fun and entertaining to me, especially when we presented it at the STEAM Festival. Our group received a lot of compliments and comments to go on Shark Tank.

In regards to the smaller assignments, such as the labs and other blog posts, I didn’t really find them to be enlightening or constructive. I had already taken Bio over the summer, so doing the labs was a bit repetitive. I liked how the blog posts made us reflect, but it was something that I felt I could’ve reflected on my own without having to write one out of obligation.

Fortunately, I loved my group. We all became friends and actually enjoyed working together, which is not a common experience I have when working in groups. I did find working on two projects at the same time to be a bit overwhelming and, at times, found the side-assignments to be more busy-work rather than something that I found relative to the main projects we were working on. I understand that BioBlitz was the Macaulay event of the year, but I would have preferred to focus on one project for the STEAM Festival rather than producing a whole other big project that wouldn’t have been presented in the end.

I did find the class enjoyable. I found the small science presentations by the professor to be extremely entertaining and fun, especially the fire one. I think this was one of the better seminar classes, but I would have enjoyed a field trip of some kind with just our class. Other than that, I found this to be a great semester.