When I first enrolled in this course, I was not sure what to expect. After less than a week of being in Professor Greer’s class, I knew that I would learn an incredible amount. First and foremost, my favorite experiences in this class were the two labs that we did. Learning how to make aspirin and soap from scratch was very cool and insightful. I had no clue that soap was able to be made from simple fats and that aspirin requires such specificity while being created to ensure edibility. I felt like an actual scientist and I was able to learn that in the real world it can take hundreds of thousands of tries to figure out how to achieve a specific desired outcome.

While in the class, I found it difficult to work on two projects at the same time; however, towards the end, I felt incredibly accomplished. Luckily, the fact that these two projects were in groups made them a bit less stressful due to split responsibilities. The BioBlitz and Healthcare Innovation projects truly enabled me to learn how to do proper scientific research, create an experiment from scratch, work in groups for a prolonged period of time, and practice my presentation skills.

Additionally, I really appreciated and enjoyed the side-lectures that both Jake and Dr. Greer held throughout the course. Jake presented slideshows on doing scientific research, creating proper citations, writing lab reports, and creating abstracts, all of which were very useful. Meanwhile, Dr. Greer presented more fun slideshows and lab demonstrations, such as how certain drugs react to the human body.

This course was very insightful, fun, hands-on, and eye-opening. I learned things that I would have never expected to learn. Most importantly, I truly felt like a scientist through all of our projects and labs, and I was eager to participate each day due to the fact that Jake and Dr. Greer fostered such a strong and positive environment for learning. Thank you both very much!