Molly Tompson: Initial Blog Post

Hello SC 200! My name is Molly Tompson and I am a freshman here at Penn State. I am in the Smeal College of Business and plan on majoring in marketing. When I went to NSO, I was unsure of what courses to take. My adviser routinely passed out sheets of paper with popular general education courses on them, informing us about the gen-ed requirements at Penn State. Classes were mostly filled up–I was at the last NSO–and I was slightly overwhelmed. When my adviser told us that we had to take a science course, I started to panic. While I loved biology in high school and actually excelled in it, I knew there were no more biology classes open. I examined the list about twenty times, narrowing down my options and decided that SC 200 sounded like it would be an interesting class to take–and nothing like Physics or Chemistry, which I detested.

I never thought of science as being taught “wrong” in schools until Dr. Andrew Read suggested it on the first day of class. Perhaps that is why I am not a science major. School made me hate science. I would stay up for hours at night, trying desperately to study and understand vector versus scalar concepts,  ray-diagrams of reflected light and ionic and covalent bonds. Math is not one of my strongest subjects, and math and science always seemed to go hand in hand (except for biology…rarely, at least). Science is cool. Science explains our entire world, our entire history. But I am not a science major because I do not want to stress myself out over memorizing formulas for acceleration or motion or momentum; I do not want to attempt to describe the relationship between atoms and calculate numbers that stem from concepts that are well over my head.

Some of the most interesting elements of science that I can think of are studying outer space, planets, stars, black holes, and the universe, in general. It is fascinating to me that there is so much that is unknown; that we as human beings have made what feels like so much progress, yet we are so far from knowing everything.

Black Holes

 

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I also love to learn about prehistoric times. Dinosaurs and all of the species that inhabited the world before humans are of utmost interest to me. Animals that thrived before ice ages or died off during the meteor that struck earth so long ago; these are such interesting topics.

So, in a nutshell, this is why I am currently in SC 200. I am looking forward to a great semester!

 

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