The Student I Was, and the Individual I Am Now.

          As students, we learn many subjects but fail to notice that each one of them as interconnected fields of study. Majors remain fragmented in their realm of specialization. Insulated disciplines are housed in segregated departments to legitimize their own specific sets of ideologies. Sometimes we were lucky to find that calculus mathematics was integral to the study of physics and Newtonian motion. However, prior to this class, I would have never imagined the College of Biological Sciences to have any relevance to the School of Economics, or Political Science all the way over in the West Bank of campus. As a result of majoring in Physiology and being focused on the areas of basic science for the majority of my life, I have become a sponge to soaking up the dominant culture of my department. No longer could I see the political and social ties that my study had with other disciplines, and stopped questioning what the consequences of my actions as a scientific researcher and student had on the world. As an example, I would have never considered A Billion Wicked Thoughts as a dangerously reductionist and over-simplified piece of literature. In fact, I was most familiar with this style of writing, as it followed the recipe of the scientific method that I grew accustomed to. If this book was protected in its nest of Cartesian thinking, the discipline would have reinforced the dominant culture of this book. Without the type of interdisciplinary analysis platforms that this class has provided, individuals who do not fit in the fixed coordinates of man and woman embedded in Oggadam’s words would have no place in society. There would be no one to indict the interests tied to the questions that did not get asked or resolved within the discipline and wonder what lay in the large pile of unsorted data in the background. We would further homogenize the dominant culture reinforced in this book.     

          This realization brought two thoughts. First, I am grateful that I am now aware of the political and social contexts affected by my field of basic science study, which I previously thought of as a “pure” subject that works to reveal the “truths” of the world. I now know that this is an unattainable ideal; just as the unbreakable ties of nature and nurture, fact is always associated with context. Second, I realize the pitfalls of what current academic disciplines unconsciously lead us to do: limit discourse. To be a part of a discipline means to ask a certain set of questions, use a particular set of terms, and study a narrow set of things. Inconformity results in poor grades, failure to graduate, and exclusion from the group. Therefore it becomes increasingly difficult for a student to reanalyze their specialty from different points of views; and especially for science majors, raised to think that they are revealing pure truth, to even consider another discipline to be as “legitimate” as theirs.

          CSCL 3331 provides a platform for self-regulating discourse, one that critiques the current state and creates possibilities out of them for the future. I am grateful for the people who enriched our discussions. I loved hearing Emily’s critical voice of literature as an English major with an eye for the process of writing styles, and I appreciated the Economic background inputs from Chris. As each major incorporated their specialties to a seemingly-unrelated topic, each subject matter of this course blossomed to reveal its interdisciplinary ties and influences.

          At the end of the semester, I am aware of the social and political implications of my study. I am no longer a physiology major that researches to reveal the metabolic pathways of the potent hyperphagia-promoting neuropeptide NPY. Instead, I realize that I am an individual with a degree in physiology that investigates to help the society’s obesity epidemic.