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Unfamiliar Ground/Brainstorming

Lynn's picture

 In the past, all of my class projects have involved PowerPoint and nervous stuttering. I don't have a nice history with presentations, and I don't yet have a good idea for the presentation next week. 

We have been told to focus on what we, personally, got out of the class. What did I get out of EvoLit? Maybe I can start there. I have learned to approach evolution - and, by extent, any subject, really - with a much more open, abstract mind. I  can now take the basic principle behind something, and apply it to other things that I encounter; from this, I've also learned to cross disciplines more easily, which is, I suppose, a natural enough outgrowth. I've been playing with the idea of using some of the math my Linear Algebra class is covering to open up my presentation - it would be meta, in a way, and we seem to like meta -  but I'm not certain where to go, after that. I've been mostly focused on the Existentialism in this course, and the idea of competing infinities, and I want to see them represented in my project, but I don't know how to present that... I want to do something interactive, I think. Have people follow the connections they make from one subject to the next - a flowchart? It is apparent that I have no idea what I am going to do. I had hoped to reach a decision by brainstorming here (surely, with the pressure of other people possibly reading my words, I would be pushed to think of something worthwhile?), but I've still got nothing. 

Taking EvoLit has really influenced how I approach my other classes, though, and I want my project to reflect that.

Comments

dfishervan's picture

Incorporating material from other classes

I think you should pull in elements from your other courses into your presentation. In our discussion section on Thursday, we focused on the idea of endlessness and I do think that involves realizing that all of our college courses do not end once we take the final or even once we graduate. Before taking this course, I had a tendency to confine all of my courses and unconsciously emphasize their boundaries. I would count down until the day that the courses I disliked would end and dream about the day when I would never have to think about that subject area again. I think that's one of the problems that results from being premed and having a set list of classes that need to be completed: you tend to focus on completing that individual requirement and forget about how all of the requirements work together to prepare you for the medical world (maybe this is a hazard of having any goal and not wandering around without a purpose? ). While I did appreciate moments where all of my courses seemed to intersect, this class has enhanced my appreciation of those moments and has encouraged me to look ways in which ideas from one class apply to another class. Throughout the semester, I managed to connect material from two of my other courses to discussions brought up in Stories of Evolution. It wasn't actually until last Thursday's class when we were talking about accuracy, where I managed to link my fourth class (probability and statistics) with Stories of Evolution. That "aha" moment was certainly a rewarding moment. Learning about the limitlessness of undergraduate courses and how different, seeming unrelated courses can play off one another and enhance your overall learning experience is an extremely important lesson derived from this class which you should try to incorporate into your presentation! I don't know if this helped at all but nonetheless, I am sure you will come up with a great presentation!

Lynn's picture

 Thanks for the advice! It

 Thanks for the advice! It was very helpful, actually; hearing that someone else has had a similar experience helps me to feel more confident in my own. I definitely agree with a lot of what you said - in high school, in particular, I drew very sharp borders between all of my subjects, but now I have learned to enjoy the melding of different disciplines. 

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