Reflecting Course Question- Connections

Looking back on the course, we have covered so many areas in science. Three main themes we discussed were Cycles, Transcription/Translation and Proteins. Many of the topics that were covered in this course were more entended and more intricate information on topics that were covered in many other science courses.

For example, when learning about cycles, we learned about Glycolysis, the Citric Acid Cycle, Gluconeogenesis, Beta Oxidation cycles, Photosynthesis, Cell Respiration and the Electron Transport Chain. All of these cycles I have covered in one or more previous science classes that I have taken. Including, but not limited to, Intro to Biology, Anatomy and Physiology and Organic Chemistry. In this course, we took a deeper look into each cycle, and I am able to understand them much better having reviewed and learned more about them. I really liked the fact that we were able to review things that may have already been learned in a previous course, because it really helps me understand it and refresh the cycles in my mind. It is going to help me be able to remember all of the cycles after I am completely out of school.

Transcription and Translation we have been learning about for what seems like forever. But, there has always been more to learn on these topics. While we learned about this throughout highschool and throughout different college science courses, I never got as in depth as we did in this course. I always had trouble distinguishing transcription from translation, even though it had been gone over hundreds of times. After this course, I am comfortable with the two and have a deeper understanding of what actually occurs during each. Pulling this into the Genetics course was great too! I was able to really concentrate on the two areas and apply them to more than one field at the same time.

Proteins are also things that have been talked about over the years. I just felt like this course helped to solidify the facts about them. This course helped bring things together for me. While learing about proteins as enzymes, which has been something we have all learned about at least once before this course, it has become more clear what an enzyme actually is and how proteins and enzymes relate to one another. Enzymes are needed to catalyze most reactions that occur in our bodies. This course helped to connect the need for proteins (as enzymes) for most of the reactions that we learned about to make them work,

I wish that there were more classes that sort of brought everything together like this one did. While we brought together different areas of science, we also were able to get more in depth into specific topics within. This course helped me solidify ideas, cycles, facts and much more. It helped me to connect what I have learned in other classes together, which made each topic make more sense and made it all seem a little more relavent.