I have spent some time thinking about this class and its relationship to the goals of Macaulay Honors College. I believe that the goal of the Macaulay seminars is to expand the students learning about New York and their lives within this amazing city. Another part of the Macaulay classes should be to expand upon certain skills that are useful for honors students for the rest of their lives. Finally all the Macaulay classes seem to have an emphasis on working in groups and building team skills. This class did not fully embody all three of these things. If the class I was taking was going to be called “Healthcare innovations and Bioblitz” I would have been more understanding of the things we did in this class. It felt as if the professors for this seminar were asked to fill time in the students schedule by doing whatever they could think of. I dont believe that was the problem just for this class. After talking to many seminar 3 students it  seemed like they all had a similar feeling. There was very little guidance and direction to what any seminar 3 was going to be. One class I talked to at the Steam fair said that their professor focused on pesticides for the entire year. When I compare our class to theirs I feel like there must have been some miscommunication in what was expected from this seminar. I dont think any of this was the fault of the Professor or the ITF but I feel like Macaulay needs to come up with a better and more cohesive idea for seminar 3.

Judging our class by itself I feel like I can say I learned something that I can take with me. Since most of the students in the class were not planning on going into sciences I think the level of science work that we did was well suited to our abilities. The most important skills I learned from this class is probably the importance of creating drafts or outlines. For both the Bioblitz project and the healthcare innovation essay we had a lot of pre-existing material to base our essays and posters on because we had written drafts and outlines already which made the process much easier. I was lucky this year to work with one of the best groups that I’ve ever had so all the work was done relatively easily and we worked together well. Looking back on the course I think there is a chance I would’ve signed up for a class like this as an elective if It was clear about what was involved in the class.