SiOWfa16: Science in Our World: Certainty and Controversy

Hi class, my name is Mike Lupo and I am a freshman here at Penn State. I’m from Holmdel, New Jersey which is about 4 hours from here. Its located centrally in New Jersey so I am only about 20 minutes from the nearest beach which is nice in the summer. I am currently enrolled in DUS, but would like to study finance or economics down the road. When I was scheduling my classes with my advisor, I first wanted to select all of the required classes for an intended business path. After those classes were squared away I was able to pick an elective that intrigued me. Science is everywhere in our world and that is interesting to me. Weather it be the makeup of the solar system all the way down to sports science, it is such broad topic that everyone should be able to find an area that peaks their interest. When reading the course overview, this class seemed to hit on all areas of science that do interest me. Unlike chemistry where a lot of it is memorization or math, SC200 allows you to think critically and not have to be burdened with knowing how to do stoichiometry or significant figures. I am looking forward to the topics discussed in this class after receiving the schedule and feel that this class will keep me interested throughout the entire semester.

I am not planning to be a science major for multiple reasons. The first is that I absolutely hate chemistry. I not only do not understand it but I also don’t find it interesting in any way. I struggled with it on the high school level, so I can only imaging the problems I would have here with the higher level Chem classes. Another reason is that I have always been interested in the business field and was set on my major being business related before I was even done with high school. My father was a finance major and loves his job, so that probably helped sway me towards a degree in either finance or economics. Although parts of science do interest me, I don’t love it enough as a whole to pursue it as a major. However, I am very eager to get going in SC200 and see what this class has to offer. It seems unlike any other science class I have ever taken and Andrew seems like a great teacher. When looking over the class schedule one of the topics that jumped out at me was “do fish feel pain?” I found that topic interesting because growing up near the beach, you always see people fishing. Even tough I’ve been exposed to fishing a lot in my life, I never really thought about weather or not a fish feels pain when it gets hooked. This led me to an interesting article which can be found HERE which goes into further detail about the kind of pain fish feel in relation to the kind of pain humans feel.