Writing in my Discipline - Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology
I am enrolled in this class as a Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology student looking to explore my Jewish identity, as well as gain skills and insights that can improve my success in my discipline. As an NBB major, majority of my writing is not creative based, but rather evidence based. I do research in which I have to read, analyze, and respond to scientific articles using the evidence presented in them. Evidence is a clear foundation of all science and scientific research, especially in a field like Neuroscience that is always growing. Although majority of the writing for my classes is not necessarily creative, creativity is a very important skill in creating and conducting my lab experiments as well as presenting the methods and results is a visually aesthetic manner. In the past, I have been assigned to create appealing scientific research posters, and many of the skills used to design the poster, such as correctly identifying the audience, appropriately presenting to it, and displaying the information in an intriguing way, are similar to those used in constructing our websites.
The course's multimodal component is not just important to NBB but to science in general. Scientists from around the world constantly ask each other questions. The internet provides a global circuit where they can exchange ideas and contribute to each others research.
Image from NY Times (Alison Fromme, Jennifer Cutraro, Katherine Schulman)
One way that scientists communicate with each other is by responding to their published articles with comments, follow-up experiments, and experimental replications for analysis across numerous sources of data.
They will also often write peer reviews of other scientists' articles before they are published in order to help improve them. Scientific communication is not always as formal as the examples above; scientists also communicate informally over the internet through blogs, such as our own, and chat rooms.
Another component of this class is timeliness, a skill that is most definitely necessary in the scientific world. Besides the deadlines of experimental results, lab write-ups, and paper analyses that I face on a daily basis as a science student, scientists in the real world often have deadlines for papers, experimental results, and peer reviews. Timeliness is extremely important in the science world, especially for scientists trying to make a discovery before others. This class' requirement of keeping up to date with the readings, material, and assignments will continue to strengthen my skills in timeliness that are a requirement for my success as an NBB major and a scientist.