I am transforming the age old saying “time flies when you’re having fun” to “time flies when deadlines are looming”. Don’t get me wrong, I am having a blast after all it is my senior year. But with projects, exams, lit reviews and the whole world sitting on your shoulders feeling you get being a typical college student has made this semester slip through my fingers. Needless to say I am surprised I am writing this blog right now but I am glad I finally get to take a minute to evaluate my progress thus far.
My capstone is well under way. Going from transforming the wet lab into suitable habitats for land animals was a rough and trying process but it is proving to be worth the labor. And we certainly are making up for the lack of luck/progress we had last year in the lab. We are diving right into two different research projects, one of which is counting as my capstone. I would be lying if I said I was not over whelmed by the work load but again once the results come in I’m sure that satisfactory accomplished feeling will make the months seem worth it. As for an update with the experiments, we are currently awaiting our IACUC Protocol to be approved. Once we get the go ahead we will be ordering our tadpoles and starting promptly 10 days after their arrival. We decided on 10 days because the transformation period of tadpoles lasts approximately 6 weeks. We have a delicate timeframe to work with to ensure proper adaptation to the new environment and to squeeze in a sufficient number of learning trials before they morph into frogs. My experiment with the tortoises is still in the research phase, however, I am editing my proposal currently. I want to focus on the predator perception in the tortoises. I am ready to design the experiment and get underway. We are also looking into doing a possible positive reinforcement (the giving of a reward) manipulation with the tortoises diet since they tend to prefer a certain grass that does not provide adequate nutrients. We also have the idea to do a vocalization analysis. I am very excited for all of our ideas in the lab and that our remaining animals are cooperating with us.
As for the Paideia discussions thus far, I am very impressed. I am finding everyone’s readings very interesting. I am slightly timid for my go around first of all because I will find it difficult to talk about one experiment over the others we are working on and second I am having trouble deciding on that perfect article to share that encapsulates my research in a cohesive fashion. I am slightly confident that perfect article that everyone in the cohort will enjoy will reveal itself to me in a timely fashion. I love how our conversations flow flawlessly into each other. We have and such a great diversity of topics this year and yet I feel like we can always tie it into something psychology related, and isn’t that what a liberal arts education is all about. My favorite article and discussion so far has been the intrinsic/extrinsic article. I learned a lot especially about myself. I always knew myself to be an intrinsic person but I never realized how much it has affected my relationships with other people (as a side note it is massively intimating to be surrounded by all those extrinsic people we have in our cohort). If I could change one thing about our discussions though, I would appreciate if we can give a brief synopsis on what the capstone/research is all about. We have been getting great articles but sometimes I find myself guessing what my fellow peers are pursuing with their studies. That has to be my only complaint about the year so far. I look forward to the remaining half of the semester and all the future amazing discussions we will be having.
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