Category Archives: RCL 2 Blog

Penn Sit University Issue Brief

The following is a draft of my issue brief about why Penn State should encourage students take breaks from prolonged sitting and stand more often:

Sitting is positively associated with markers for cardiovascular risk. Glucose and insulin peak higher for those who remain continuously seated after eating, relative to those who punctuate sitting with low-intensity movement, such as walking, every twenty minutes, among 19 obese but non-diabetic people, according to a 2012 study by Dunstan et al. According to the same study, lower levels of blood sugar and insulin following meals are associated with a lower risk for type 2 diabetes mellitus. Additionally, people burn fewer calories while sitting, whether they are of healthy weight or obese (Levine, Schleusner, & Jensen, 2000). Together, these findings explain the report of Hamilton et al. (2007) linking sitting time to increased risk for type 2 diabetes mellitus and obesity.

Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) decreases while sitting. LPL is an enzyme that appears to directly interact with cholesterol in the blood and promote its uptake, reducing LDL (bad) cholesterol levels and indirectly increasing HDL (good) cholesterol levels. LPL is produced by skeletal muscles, which produce higher amounts of LPL during exercise. However, continuous low levels of activity seem to be needed for continuous LPL production. Studies in rats show that after four hours of activity analogous to sitting, LPL levels decline for a period of about fourteen hours by 90 – 95%, at which level they remain; thus a single day spent sitting abrogates most LPL activity. Since LPL improves cholesterol levels, sitting indirectly raises triglycerides and LDL cholesterol and lowers HDL cholesterol (Hamilton, Hamilton, & Zderic, 2007; Hamilton, Healy, Dunstan, Zderic, & Owen, 2008). LDL cholesterol levels positively correlate with risk for fatal atherosclerosis and heart attacks, as do high triglyceride to HDL ratios (Assmann & Schulte, 1992). Together, these findings provide a mechanism to support the research by Katzmarzyk and Lee (2012) showing that sitting increases the risk of death by any cause and that, on average, people who sit for more than six hours per day die between 1.8 to 2.0 years sooner than those who sit for fewer than three hours per day.

How much Penn State students are sitting, & when.

College students are not invincible against the maladies of prolonged sitting—not even at Penn State University. Penn State professors David Conroy, Steriani Elavsky, and Shawna Doerksen and graduate students Jaclyn Maher and Amanda Hyde (2013) monitored the activity of 128 undergraduates and found that on average, they sat for 67% of their waking hours—over eleven hours per day. Conroy et al. also found, paradoxically, that students both sat and purposefully exercised the most on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, since, they reasoned, students have classes and sports practices on weekdays.

 

Curious about what factors besides the day of the week lead to intrapersonal differences in sedentary behavior, Conroy et al. found, unsurprisingly, that habitually sedentary students tended to sit more during the study, but that the stronger their daily wills to avoid sedentary behavior, the less time they spent sitting. This suggests that Penn State students, though predisposed towards sitting in class and while studying, can sit less if they choose. Therefore, if Penn State can convince students to avoid prolonged sitting, it is likely that students would begin to habitually sit less.

Indeed, some colleges are already piloting standing workstations. At the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, a pair of liberal arts colleges in Minnesota, exercise science professor Mary Stenson prompted her department to install standing desks in half of the classrooms in Murray Hall, a gym facility on campus. Although a controlled study to determine whether these standing workstations benefit students’ performance and well-being is still underway, Stenson reported that she feels more alert and productive at her standing desk (Dittberner, 2014). These desks were provided by JustStand, a national organization that markets Ergotron brand sit-stand workstations and other products, which it has donated to over 4,000 organizations (The Mission for JustStand.org, 2015).

Students at Penn State will likewise benefit from a well-designed program to encourage them to reduce the time they spend sitting. Admittedly, implementing a standing desk program at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University would be easier than implementing one at Penn State. The former pair of institutions enrolls only 3,744 undergraduates and charges over $40,000 in annual tuition (The College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University, 2015), while Penn State’s University Park campus has 40,541 undergraduates, who pay $17,502 (in state) or $30,452 (out of state) per year (The Pennsylvania State University, 2015). Penn State is therefore less flexible and receives fewer private funds; consequently, implementing a standing desk program would likely take more time and effort, although it could implement a small pilot program as an initial step towards determining how to design a larger program.

Recommendations for Penn State to improve

There are a number of mutually inclusive components of this program to reduce the amount of time that students spend sitting. However, Conroy et al. (2013) found that both students’ habits and intentions to avoid being sedentary strongly influence their sedentary behavior. Simply providing students with standing workstations without educating them as to why they should avoid sitting would likely change the engrained habits of few students, so the investment in standing desks would be wasted. In order to change students’ sedentary habits, Penn State must first make students intend to sit less, which could be accomplished by educating students first about the health impacts of sitting. After students want to sit less, they would be more likely to use equipment that Penn State would provide later on to change their habits.

The endeavor to encourage Penn State students to interrupt long sitting breaks would comprise three main goals: first, educate students about why they should sit less and for shorter periods of time; second, provide students with the equipment that they would need to accomplish this; third, develop ways to continuously motivate students to avoid protracted sitting. To develop these goals, it must be noted that Professor Conroy himself said, “It took a little while to get used to standing while working…. It’s best to ease your way into it” (LaJeunesse, 2013). That being said, students should not immediately try to stand up continuously as they work. Rather, they should first focus on interrupting habitual protracted sitting. As Professor Conroy again said, “Frequent interruptions to the amount of time spent sitting are likely to accumulate over time into valuable health benefits” (LaJeunesse, 2013). As students become accustomed to standing, they can stand for longer periods of time.

This overall goal begins with the first goal of educating students, which would be the responsibility of those who develop the classes and design the curricula of different majors, as well as of students to spread the message. Students already take interest in their fitness by frequenting the gym and taking some of the 65 fitness-based kinesiology classes that Penn State offers for credit, presumably because they have learned throughout their lives that exercise is important for health (The Pennsylvania State University, 2015). The aim of this goal is to create a culture in which students view prolonged sitting as being even more detrimental to their health than lack of vigorous exercise. Initially, this could be accomplished by incorporating lectures on the scientific risks of sitting into every physical fitness class. Additionally, a new 1.5-credit kinesiology class consisting of lectures on the risks of prolonged sitting could be created. This class would meet for less class time than most fitness classes, but most of the grade would be based on one assignment: wearing a device to measure the amount of time spent sitting and standing and being graded on the frequency of breaks while sitting.

Not every student takes physical education classes, however. Students are required to take at least 3 general health credits at Penn State, but these can come from sedentary biobehavioral health and nutrition classes as well (The Pennsylvania State University, 2015). Therefore, the general education requirements could be changed to mandate at least 1.5 to 3 physically active classes to ensure that all students would learn about the risks of prolonged sitting. To reach students who are not currently taking a physical education class, infographics about the adverse effects of prolonged sitting could be placed in popular locations around campus to encourage health-minded students to take notice. All together, these measures could educate Penn State students that sedentary behavior is as influential as physical activity in determining health. “The health message has been delivered really successfully that physical activity is good for you…. However, very few people think about the dangers of sitting all day,” (LaJeunesse, 2013), said Professor Conroy.

After Penn State students begin to realize the importance of avoiding prolonged sitting, Penn State can begin the second goal: provide students with the resources they need to avoid prolonged sitting. This goal would fall to the administrators who purchase classroom and commons building furniture. As purchasing new equipment may be expensive, these administrators have several options to mitigate the expenses. First, they can replace furniture as it wears out, as they would need to purchase new furniture anyway. This option has the upside of being relatively inexpensive but the downside of being slow, as it may be many years before all of the furniture wears out and is replaced. Second, they could sell the existing furniture to other schools that need to replace theirs; this option would recuperate some of the costs of buying standing-compatible desks but would involve effort to sell the furniture, and Penn State would not be able to sell some of it, such as large, built-in desks and lecture hall seats. Third, Penn State could raise tuition by the amount (small, compared to the overall tuition) needed to defray the cost of the standing equipment. Additionally, there are already products that use a harness to support a desk in front of one’s chest, on which one can place a laptop or notebook. Penn State could design such a product and sell it at the bookstore to help defray the costs of new furniture. Combined, these options would provide students with materials that they would need to stand up and minimize the cost to Penn State.

To continuously encourage students to interrupt sitting, with or without using these materials, is the third goal of this program. Professor Conroy is himself developing interventions to encourage this behavior, which I will interview him about. Penn State University has developed a wellness initiative, Take Care of Your Health, in which faculty who complete a WebMD wellness profile and get a preventative physical exam and biometric screening are rewarded $100 each year they complete it (Take Care of Your Health Initiative, 2015). Through an initiative, Walking Works, faculty of the Hershey Medical Center and the Penn State College of Medicine can compete to take the most steps (Walking Works returns to medical center campus next month, 2006). Combining Walking Works with Take Care of Your Health, Penn State could develop a program for all campuses in which teams of faculty, and even students, could compete to take the most steps and spend as little time seated as possible. Top teams could be given modest prizes. Deliberate programs such as these could encourage students and faculty to sit for shorter periods of time and be more active.

Meanwhile, Penn State could implement a number of other, informal strategies to reduce sedentary time. The campus is under constant renovation, and new buildings could be designed to better accommodate standing or sit-standing behavior. Food courts, especially, could be changed to eliminate buffets, since students can take too much food and spend a long uninterrupted time sitting to eat their meal. Even more simply, the buffets could do away with trays (just as there are no trays in the a la carte area of Redifer), so that students could carry only one or two dishes at once and would need to get up periodically for more food; this strategy could discourage both uninterrupted sitting and overeating. To encourage students to take breaks to move around while studying, Penn State could design a smartphone app that would remind them every half hour to get up for a few minutes and record, using the phone’s pedometer, whether the students did. This information could be used in the aforementioned wellness competition and physical education classes contingent on reducing sitting. During class, professors could have students stand up for two minutes every 25 minutes (once in a 50 minute class, twice in a 75 minute class). Research suggests that elementary school students lose focus when sitting for long periods of time and that in children, adolescents, and even the elderly, aerobic fitness positively correlates with working memory. Moreover, obesity, to which prolonged sitting can lead, is correlated to brain damage (Ratey & Sattelmair, 2012). These informal interventions to break up prolonged sitting may therefore improve students’ health and academic performance.

Concession of the drawbacks of these approaches

Before such initiatives go into effect, Penn State should consider the potential drawbacks. Cost and effort is the foremost tangible obstacle to providing students with the resources to stand in class and while studying. However, the strategies proposed, including selling current furniture, replacing furniture as it wears out, redesigning buildings to be renovated to accommodate standing, designing and selling wearable notebook or laptop harnesses, and raising tuition to cover the unmet costs would enable Penn State to provide standing or sit-stand workstations for students. Another drawback of implementing standing desks is the potential for students to begin standing too much, too soon. Indeed, Krause et al. (2000) show that prolonged standing, while already a risk factor for the development of varicose veins, may lead to atherosclerosis more so than prolonged sitting, at least in those with ischemic heart disease. Clearly, standing all day is not the solution; rather, the consensus among all studies seems to be that prolonged periods of being stationary, rather than specifically sitting or standing, impair health.

Conclusion, and why this matters

A large amount of research shows that prolonged inactivity, especially sitting, leads to a broad range of chronic diseases, including obesity and heart disease, and to a greater risk of death from any cause over time. Moreover, sedentary behavior impairs learning and focus. Schools are now taking notice and piloting programs to encourage students to move more. While elementary school is the ideal time to merge school and physical activity, college is not too late, and students who in college form healthy work habits may carry these habits into the workplace. While research has revealed risks of prolonged sitting, a smaller amount of research suggests that prolonged standing in one position may also be risky; therefore, the goal is not to encourage students to stand for long periods of time, but rather to avoid sitting for long periods of time. Penn State can encourage students by providing furniture—such as the high tables in Atherton and Simmons—at which students can either stand or sit, developing wellness initiatives, educating students on the risks of prolonged inactivity, and a myriad of other strategies. This endeavor will require time, effort, and money, but the short-term cost of investing in students’ health is outweighed by the long-term benefits for students: improved academic performance, health, and lower medical expenses later in life. By habitualizing students to avoid sedentary behavior now, Penn State can give its students longer, more productive, and healthier lives.

 

References

Assmann, G., & Schulte, H. (1992). Relation of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides to incidence of atherosclerotic coronary artery disease (the PROCAM experience). The American Journal of Cardiology, 70(7), 733 – 37. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/000291499290550I#

Benden, M. E., Blake, J. J., Wendel, M. L., & Huber, J. C., Jr. (2011). The Impact of Stand-Biased Desks in Classrooms on Calorie Expenditure in Children. American Journal of Public Health, 101(8), 1433 – 36. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2010.300072

The College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.csbsju.edu/

Conroy, D. E., Maher, J. P., Elavsky, S., Hyde, A. L., & Doerksen, S. E. (2013). Sedentary behavior as a daily process regulated by habits and intentions. Health Psycology, 32(11), 1149 – 57. doi:10.1037/a0031629

Dunstan, D. W. et al. (2012). Breaking Up Prolonged Sitting Reduces Postprandial Glucose and Insulin Responses. Diabetes Care, 35(5), 976 – 83. doi:10.2337/dc11-1931

Dittberner, A. (2014). Standing workstations appear on campus. Retrieved from http://www.csbsju.edu/news/standingdesks

Hamilton, M. T., Hamilton, D. G., & Zderic, T. W. (2007). Role of Low Energy Expenditure and Sitting in Obesity, Metabolic Syndrome, Type 2 Diabetes, and Cardiovascular Disease. Diabetes, 56(11), 2655 – 67. doi:10.2337/db07-0882

Hamilton, M. T., Healy, G. N., Dunstan, D. W., Zderic, T. W., & Owen, N. (2008). Too Little Exercise and Too Much Sitting: Inactivity Physiology and the Need for New Recommendations on Sedentary Behavior. Current Cardiovascular Risk Reports, 2(4), 292 – 98. doi:10.1007/s12170-008-0054-8

Katz, A., Mulder, B., & Pronk, N. (2014). Sit, Stand, Learn: Using Workplace Wellness Sit-Stand Results to Improve Student Behavior and Learning. American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal, 19(1), 42 – 44. doi:10.1249/FIT.0000000000000089.

Katzmarzyk, P. T. & Lee, I-M. (2012). Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis. BMJ Open, 2(4). doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2012-000828

LaJeunesse, S. (2013). Probing Question: is sitting bad for your health? Retrieved from http://news.psu.edu/story/295260/2013/11/14/research/probing-question-sitting-bad-your-health

Levine, J. A., Schleusner, S. J., & Jensen, M. D. (2000). Energy expenditure of nonexercise activity. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 72(6), 1451 – 54. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11101470.

The Mission for JustStand.org. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.juststand.org/tabid/960/language/en-US/default.aspx

The Pennsylvania State University. (2015). Retrieved from www.psu.edu

Krause, N. et al. (2000). Standing at work and progression of carotid atherosclerosis. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 26(3), 227 – 36. doi:10.5271/sjweh.536

Take Care of Your Health Initiative. (2015). Retrieved from http://ohr.psu.edu/benefits/take-care-of-your-health/

Ratey, J. J., & Sattelmair, J. (2012). The Mandate for Movement: Schools as Agents of Change. In Physical Activity Across the Lifespan (12). Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-3606-5_12.

Roy, B. A. (2012). Sit Less and Stand and Move More. American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal, 16(2), 4. doi:10.1249/01.FIT.0000413046.15742.a0

Van der Ploeg, H. P., Chey, T., Korda, R. J., Banks, E. B., & Bauman, A. (2012). Sitting Time and All-Cause Mortality Risk in 222 497 Australian Adults. Archives of Internal Medicine, 172(6), 494 – 500. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2011.2174

Walking Works returns to medical center campus next month. (2006). Retrieved from http://news.psu.edu/story/206019/2006/01/19/walking-works-returns-medical-center-campus-next-month

Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro American Unity

Malcolm X founded the Organization of Afro American Unity because he believed that in 1964, African Americans should not have to contend with racism. Black people throughout all of America, Malcolm X thought, had been attempting to form alliances with each other and with white Americans for much time, without success. Malcolm X reasoned that African Americans would form stronger bonds with each other and with black people in Africa, with “people who look something like we do,” as he put it, than they would with any white Americans. Therefore, he created the Organization of Afro American Unity to allow all Africans across the world to collaborate in order to end racism.

Malcolm X’s call for African Americans to defend themselves is reasonable but seems too vague in drawing the line between defense and aggression. He calls for equality in armament between white and black people, which, once achieved, I would imagine would reduce violence. However, this could encourage black people to aggressively obtain means of self defense. Malcolm X should have clarified how he wanted black people to arm themselves: non-violently, or by any means necessary.

Blog Topics Revealed

For my Passion Blog, I have decided to write about my experiences with doing research in Dr. Wang’s gene regulation laboratory since September of 2014, for four purposes:

First, I want to help inform those of you who are interested in research but either haven’t started or are working in an area that is very different from my own area of research. With knowledge of what working in a wet lab and dealing with pipettes, cell cultures, and experiments that don’t work the way you wanted them to, I hope that you can make more informed decisions about what kind of lab to join.

Second, I want to show those of you who are not interested in research what working in a lab is like so that you do not continue to think of lab work, if you think so now, as some kind of black box accessible to mad scientists in white lab coats. (I haven’t actually yet worn a lab coat in the lab; go figure!)

Third, I want to investigate certain laboratory procedures that I myself will do in the coming months, such as western blotting, and write about them so that I will know in advance how to perform them.

Finally, I want to improve my skills of translating scientific jargon and techniques into text that the average non-science major can understand. I believe that everyone should know how science works and should not be overwhelmed, thinking that they have no hope of understanding. The only scientific thing people have no hope of ever understanding is quantum mechanics. (I say as a biochem major.)

This quote is probably misattributed to Albert Einstein, but it follows: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

 

For my Civic Issues Blog, I would like to write about the controversies surrounding education. I believe that education is our hope of a good future, but there is no one right way to educate a student, and thus I would like to investigate many issues, including:

How does one reliably measure student performance?

How does one reliably measure teacher performance?

What approaches to education, such as teacher-lectures-students-listen (direct instruction), differentiated instruction, home schooling, autodidacticism, and cyber schooling seem to work best?

How does learning become fun, not stressful?

How can teachers make students genuinely interested in the material?

How much time spent in school is wasted? How could school time be used more efficiently?

Is college tuition going to continue to rise, and how will students afford it if the increases in their eventual salaries cannot keep pace?

And how should we reduce illiteracy in countries where it is rampant, such as how the Malini Foundation aims to educate women in Sri Lanka?

“This I Believe” more coherently

Two people work on the same London double-decker bus. One drives the bus. The other walks around collecting passengers’ fares all day. Who is more likely to die of heart disease?

We have known the answer for sixty years. The renowned epidemiologist Jerry Noah Morris researched this question in 1953 and, not surprisingly, found that the sedentary drivers were significantly more susceptible to heart disease than were the ambulatory conductors. The same bus, the same hours—let’s even for now assume the same salary—but not the same rate of heart disease. And so, if you were the driver and were offered the conductor’s job, would you accept that substitution?

I believe that the simple substitutions we unthinkingly make, day in and day out, determine our fates. And that is why I stand up in class. I have been standing for almost two years now—two years of exercising my soleus muscles instead of letting them dangle. Now, a common excuse for not exercising, and one for which I have been guilty, is a lack of time. But I know that standing up in class takes exactly as much time as sitting, yet look at the long-term benefits! I have no bloodwork data for myself, but innumerable research studies have found that standing more and sitting less is associated with lower insulin spikes, lower cholesterol and triglycerides, and lower risk of death. All by one simple substitution.

Now, take standing on the job a step further—or maybe ten thousand steps—and voila, the treadmill desk. While the benefits of standing are largely invisible, the benefits of walking are countable data—by mile or by step. While writing his fourth book, Drop Dead Healthy, A. J. Jacobs walked twelve hundred miles on his treadmill-laptop desk, substituting it for the sitting desk where he wrote his first book, The Know-it-All, when he probably just walked to the bathroom.

I too made walking habitual towards the end of tenth grade, walking to school instead of riding the bus. To walk one way took twenty minutes, and to ride took ten, but I regarded those twenty minutes as wholly productive, and those ten as sedentary waste. On days I walked both ways, my pedometer clicked five thousand extra steps. And so, by taking only twenty extra minutes each day, from the end of tenth grade until the end of twelfth, I substituted nearly eight hundred walking miles for eight hundred folded in a cramped, yellow bus.

I believe that many maladies that exist today—heart disease, obesity, and such—result in part from substituting comfort or convenience for salubrity. But I also believe that by pushing ourselves outside our comfortable niches—by substituting back the healthy behaviors we were meant to do, we can reverse these epidemics. Will that be comfortable? The first two weeks I stood in school, explaining what in the heck I was doing embarrassed me. My calves and ankles grew stiff and sore. But the pain did subside. And there were many days—frigid, blustery days—when I yearned to be seated in a heated bus as I pushed against the wind. But I kept walking.

“This I Believe” before editing my belief.

Twenty-four. Tick. Tick. Not enough time—never enough for us. And yet, how do we explain why it is enough for prolific writers and seminal ? How enough time for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write 625 compositions. Let me add that Mozart died a month before turning 36—he lived fewer hours than I hope any of us will, yet is among the most prolific of composers. How?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn’t watch Teletubbies or play World of Warcraft. At age three, he followed his sister Nannerl to the harpsichord bench, where his father Leopold ensured he practiced hours per day. At age five, he began composing, and by age ten, had published his first sonatas and symphonies.

Why didn’t we all publish music before we hit puberty? We had the time. We have 24 hours each day, the same as Mozart. The same as Archimedes. The same as Gandhi. And the same as Benjamin Franklin, who—amid printing newspapers, studying electricity, and leading the American Revolution—had the time to record how he did those things.

Here is a quote from Franklin’s autobiography, just after he had begun working and eating at a printing press in London.

“I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in number, were great guzzlers of beer…. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos’d, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labour. I endeavoured to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer. He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.”

End quote. I am then not the first to believe that the simple substitutions we make determine how successful we are. Simply choosing water rather than beer determined how successful Franklin was. Simply relieving himself of the need for beer’s taste and strength relieved Franklin of paying for it. It relieved him of cloudy intoxication, such that Franklin could efficiently use his 24 hours. Simply saying, “I don’t need this comfort, or this luxury, or this idle time; there is something better I can do,” I believe we can all make simple substitutions. I believe we can all replace our spades with climbing picks. That we can stop digging holes, one scoop per day, and start ascending the mountains where we really want to be.

The Changing of the Blog

If we are calling RCL II “Revenge of Civic Life: Return of the Blogs,” then I must begin this class by posing two ideas I have for each blog: the Passion Blog and the Civic Issues Blog.

Last semester, I wrote my Passion Blog to analyze whether or not various nutritional claims stood up to scientific inquiry. I am currently taking a nutrition class and would like to change my topic to a different topic, possibly another aspect of health: exercise science, as I am beginning to exercise more this semester. Like nutrition, exercise profoundly affects health, and scientists are now discovering fascinating things, such as that exercise can change gene expression in our muscles and that sedentary behavior may be unhealthy in and of itself, not just because it takes time away from exercise. There are many dubious claims about exercise, too, and I would like to determine whether these are scientifically valid, quackery, or need more research.

Being myself new to the field of scientific research, I would like to learn more about laboratory procedures. I could alternatively look up various techniques used in the laboratory, describe what they do and how to do them in detail, and review how they were developed, discuss their limitations, and talk about potential improvements that to those procedures. In doing so, I would hope to simultaneously improve my writing and learn skills that would improve my lab work.

Now, scientific research only works when the community at large can support it, which brings me to potential topics for my Civic Issues blog. One topic that is important to me is the future of education. The current trends in education, where elementary students must learn how to perform well on increasingly many standardized tests, and where college students must pay increasingly higher tuition in comparison to their ultimate salaries, are unsustainable. What, then, could the solution be? I would like to research these trends, their causes, and their potential solutions, while asking questions about how education will develop, such as “How will the use of technology and online classes impact education throughout all grades?” or “How will teachers change classes in the future to incorporate more creativity, individualized learning, and exercise?” In examining these issues, I hope to gain better insight into what means of education are effective and what schools are doing about the evidence behind which means are effective.

Besides education, other areas of society seem to be unsustainable; another one that is important to me is healthcare. Healthcare in the United States encompasses many issues, including whether the individual or the employer should provide it, how people can afford the rising costs of healthcare, and how much money we should invest in caring for people who are elderly, terminally ill, or incapable of giving back to the economy an amount of productivity equivalent to their care. Additionally, there is the issue of healthcare in other countries. In writing about this topic, I hope to understand how people can afford healthcare, how the healthcare system may change in coming years, how healthcare works in other countries, and what could be done to optimize it.

For my “This I believe” podcast assignment, I am considering two topics. The first is that substituting important activities for unimportant activities is key to success. I read, in response to complaints that the day is too short to do anything, that Mother Teresa, Mohandas Gandhi, and Benjamin Franklin all had 24 hours in a day, too. Mozart is among the most prolific of all composers, yet he died a month shy of age 36. The reason that these people were successful is that they substituted unproductive, unimportant parts of their life with important ones that accomplished what they wanted to. And I believe that this lesson is key to success in college and beyond.

Another topic I care strongly about is recognizing problems when they are small and solvable, rather than waiting until they mature into crises to try to solve them. Small problems take much less time and expense to fix than large ones, so they are more efficient in the end. We find that it requires some effort to study a bit each week, but learning this small amount of material is a small problem compared to the enormous problem of trying to learn a semester’s worth of material later on, during finals week. Thus, by addressing problems early on, we can avert crises, and developing the ability to detect and respond to small problems is important for us to ultimately succeed.