BME 1110 - Seeing Science in Action

Spring. 1 credit. S/U grades only.

C. Schaffer.

The goal of this “Learning Where You Live” course is for students to see and understand the actual practice of scientific research. Too often science is taught as a collection of static facts in a book when science professionals think of it as a highly creative and collaborative process for discovery. Many students leave science degree programs before they even have a chance to see how science really “works,” let alone actually participate. In this course, students will be learning about and seeing cutting-edge research in modern laboratories. Critically, they will see what the practice of science is like. The course will have three modules, each centered on the lab of a different Cornell faculty member. First, there will be a lecture by the STEM faculty member on their research that is targeted to the freshmen audience and emphasizes the importance of work, its application, and the process of discovery and exploration that is intrinsic to the research. During the ~2 weeks following the lecture, students in the course will spend a one day shadowing graduate students and post-docs in the STEM faculty member’s lab. Students will write a short description of what they saw and how it relates to the broader goals of the lab they learned about from the lecture. After all students have shadowed, there will be a second meeting that includes the students, and the scientists they shadowed, and the STEM faculty member. The focus of this second meeting will be discussing the experiments they saw, how they worked, how those measurements connect to the bigger picture goals for the laboratory and the project, as well as the nature of the relationships among the graduate students, post-docs, and faculty that enable this research. Finally, students will read and critically analyze a paper from the faculty member’s lab, with a third and final meeting to discuss how this final scientific product relates to the people, experiments, and process of science they saw in the lab and discussed. These activities will give students incredible insight into how science is done and its inherent excitement.