Knowledge across the disciplines
What I Was Supposed to Learn:
What I Actually Learned:
Nothing encompasses my freshman goals more than this final statement from Honors 100. I thought I knew what my major would be, I was trying to make sense of what the honors program would mean to me and I was already beginning to feel the intensity of the science courses. This is where I started, this is who I was. I was extremely optimistic and sort of embarrassingly over confident.
- how to navigate the university library system
- interpret the Gulf Oil Spill through different academic lenses
What I Actually Learned:
- not all Honors students are gunners
- some of these people would become my best friends
- the Gulf Oil Spill was devastating but writing poems about it wasn't going to help much
Nothing encompasses my freshman goals more than this final statement from Honors 100. I thought I knew what my major would be, I was trying to make sense of what the honors program would mean to me and I was already beginning to feel the intensity of the science courses. This is where I started, this is who I was. I was extremely optimistic and sort of embarrassingly over confident.
Final Honors 100 Statement
This quarter we had the pleasure of hearing numerous different professors from different educational subjects come speak to us about their work in relation to other disciplines. Although all of them were extremely enlightening in different ways, I found it hard to relate back to the Gulf Oil Spill only because often times we would delve so far into the subject of what is interdisciplinary that we had little time to examine what relevance it had to the core idea. I really appreciated being able to interact with many of the speakers, every one of them taught me a lot about their respective passions. The speakers that interested me the most were Timea Tihanyi and Sandor Kovacs. They were the perfect example of how interdisciplinary studies can be successful. Both of them were individually so knowledgeable and passionate about their own subjects that you thought maybe they would butt heads or their ideas would clash. However, it was really nice to see that as a real couple they work to include their spouses discipline into their own work all the time. Timea’s art pieces were gorgeous and held a lot of meaning but it was surprising when she told us how many mathematical functions she used to construct or mold most of the pieces. The lecturers helped me realize that relating one subject to another isn’t a forced action but something already present that one must find.
This being one of my first courses in college , I found it pleasant to have one class where I could just enjoy the conversation and content and not worry about getting it all down. In my other classes I started noticing how everything I was learning could be related to another subject completely. Especially in my honors 391 class, granted it is categorized interdisciplinary seminar, however I discovered that a lot of the situations in the book we were reading could not only be analyzed from a psychological standpoint but scientific as well. We examined certain behaviors of the main character and determined if she was conditioned to do so by the peer pressures and external surroundings. Even further we were able to attribute the conditioning to evolution and biology. An excerpt from a college fiction novel now suddenly had something to do with Darwin. Increasingly I began to see how education in my courses were affecting other parts of my life. Most interestingly I was mixing ice tea one day and found myself thinking about how the ions were dissociating and what the solubility of the content was. Dorky I know. But I started watching the swirling specks of citric acid dissolve into the water and I was reminded of Timea, even something as simple as a math function can be beautiful, and at that moment dissociating ions were beautiful to me.
My intended major right now is neurobiology, whether or not that changes I will always be interested in the subject. I realized I had picked a major that was in fact extremely interdisciplinary. Everything affects the brain in some way, and the study of neurobiology examines how the brain reacts to different things. Pursuing this path wont be a strictly scientific 4 years, in fact I believe studying a multitude of varying subjects will help me out in the major later. In my archaeology class we had to write a paper about our favorite subject and how that was related to archaeology. Now at first I thought it would be extremely difficult, I mean brain tissue disintegrates over time, how can I find evidence of the subject? Then I found a cornucopia of articles on cranial surgery. What was more interesting was the cranial deformations, the intentional molding of human skulls into different shapes. In this case not only do the artifacts relate to neuroscience but even the motivation behind the action or the result of such behaviors on the citizens health.
All in all I quite enjoyed the discussion that arose from the Honors 100 class, and slow I began to see how it seeped into the other areas of my life. Although I am disappointed I couldn’t relate more to the Gulf Oil Spill, the lessons I learned about interdisciplinary studies was equally as important.
Interdisciplinary Dictionary
- Technology: Systematic study of the methods and techniques employed in industry, research, agriculture, and commerce. More often the term is used to describe the practical application of scientific discoveries to industry.
- Disaster: A hazard event (natural or induced) that seriously disrupts the normal functions of society and causes widespread human, material, or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected society to cope using only its own resources.
- Personally it can mean a sudden emotional destruction or disruption.
- Specialization: The process whereby activities and tasks are broken down into component parts of an increasingly specialized nature.
- Multidisciplinary Analysis: draws on the knowledge of several disciplines, each of which provides a different perspective on a problem or issue.
- Interdisciplinary Analysis: Disciplinary knowledge, concepts, tools, and rules of investigation are considered, contrasted, and combined in such a way that the resulting understanding is greater than simply the sum of its disciplinary parts.
- Integration: Blending and linking together of individuals and groups in ways that are intended to minimize or eliminate differences and their potentially adverse effects on members of some groups.
- Transdisciplinary Analysis: is "concerned with the unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives.” It may deal with philosophical questions about the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge systems that transcend disciplines.
- Insight Learning: The ability to respond correctly to a situation that is experienced for the first time and that is different from any experience encountered previously.
- Awareness: The state of being fully conscious of pertinent stimuli and really experiencing a task or situation. Awareness requires the ability to totally focus attention on a task.
- Retrospect: a survey or review of a past course of events or period of time.
- Risk Assessment: a soft technology that allows us to gauge what might go wrong, how likely it is to go wrong, and what consequences might result if it does.
- Normal Accident: When a technology has become sufficiently complex and tightly coupled, accidents are inevitable and therefore in a sense 'normal'.
- Progress: The belief that later times are improvements over earlier times. This may be in limited respects, such as in the extent of scientific knowledge or the moral capacities of human beings.
- Deficient: lacking some essential component; inadequate in amount. The term can be used, e.g., for a deficient (culture) medium, deficient diet, or deficient strain (of an organism).
- Dispersant: A chemical agent that is used to break up concentrations of organic material, such as spilled oil.
- Degradation: the gradual step-wise and deliberate conversion of a molecule into smaller chemical entities, commonly to elucidate its chemical structure.
- Desensitize: a spontaneous decline in response resulting from continuous application of agonist, or to repeated applications or doses; such attenuation may result within minutes of prior stimulation, or may take hours to develop.
- Plover: a short-billed gregarious wading bird, typically found by water but sometimes frequenting grassland, tundra, and mountains.
- Family Charadriidae (the plover family ): several genera and numerous species, especially the ringed plovers
- Imagination: Most directly, the faculty of reviving or especially creating images in the mind's eye. But more generally, the ability to create and rehearse possible situations, to combine knowledge in unusual ways, or to invent thought experiments .
- Intuition: Immediate awareness, either of the truth of some proposition, or of an object of apprehension such as a concept. Awareness of the passage of time, or of the ineffable nature of God, have equally been claimed as intuitions.
- Kinaesthesis: The sensation that is stimulated by movements of the body or parts of the body and is mediated by proprioceptors in the vestibular system and in the muscles, tendons, and joints.