Not My Cup of Tea
Hi everyone, my name is Zach Kaplan and I’m from Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. I am a freshman majoring in broadcast journalism. To be honest, a large part of the reason I found this course was online research into “gen ed” classes that would be interesting, especially in science. I wanted to take classes my first semester of college that would make me think and see the world in a different lens than before. I found a description of SCI 200 ironically in a different blog. The line that grabbed my attention was: “This is more of a thinking-based class rather than a formula plugging class. If you still aren’t sold, I’m told the professor has an awesome accent.” (Onward State, March 21, 2013). The first week of class certainly confirmed both of those ideas. It has been eye-opening to finally have an educator in science who understands what students truly need to know about the subject if they are not choosing a scientific career path.
When deciding my major, I knew I wanted to become a journalist, a passion I followed through high school and will continue to at Penn State. I want to cover sports, because they make a difference in people’s lives and I have a passion for them. As a result, I am not a science major because I do not have any expertise in science and I struggled throughout high school in most of my science classes. I had great science teachers in 6th and 7th grade who I still visit to this day, but after that it was all downhill. I took biology, physics and chemistry in high school, and each year my patience continued to grow thin, to the point where I chose not to take a science course my senior year.
While I don’t have a vested interest, I am curious to learn more about our world and become more open-minded towards science that will impact my generation and our every-day lives. Many of the discussion topics from the schedule attached to the syllabus seem incredibly interesting and engaging and I look forward to discussing these topics in class. Science has and will continue to change lives in the future. While the subject matter taught in schools is often useless, I look forward to diving into important, controversial and interesting discussions this semester. I end this blog post with a meme with one of the most well-known scientists in the field at the moment, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Here’s to a great semester in Sci 200.
