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After a bout with mono and an unexpected medical leave in the Spring semester of 2008, I'm back and eager to further explore the melding of English and science. Due to an extreme desire to read obscene amounts of medical narratives and science non-fiction, I’ve conjured the idea of pursuing science writing as a career after college. This, combined with my aspirations to enter a health career, have compounded into an unusual hope of getting my Masters of Nursing after Bryn Mawr and writing about my experiences. A major in English and a minor in Biology seems the best way to achieve this, but who knows... last year I thought I was pre-Med.

My thought process is often convoluted, but I could provide some interesting perspectives to our class by sharing my view about making science intelligible for all types of people (through science writing) and my unending desire to read everything, about a multitude of different topics, that I can get my hands on. As an atheist raised by a Protestant and an agnostic with a strictly Catholic family, I’ve always tried to weigh theories and stories that have been presented to me. I wish I could say I was purely skeptical about life and science, but that would be a lie. My early education insisted on truth, facts, and fallacies. I’m still trying to reprogram my brain to not immediately jump for the “right” answer and instead consider other possibilities. More than anything, I look for evidence and observations to speak for themselves.

That said,

1. How can we make science interesting for the non-science person?
2. What is the evidence for evolution and what observations are we still making about this natural process?
3. Do things other than living organisms evolve?

Kate Gould, 2011 (more or less)

Year of Evolution