1. Describe the process you followed this semester to develop your ideas.
Personally, my favorite project structure was the weekly meetings we had to talk about our book. I enjoyed this because our book was super focused on the neuroscience and wasn’t really a story so every Monday I had so many questions that I was able to propose to my group and we were able to efficiently discuss them. I also really loved the fieldtrips! I thought they were amazing and we able to get so much insight as to how and what everyday physicians do on a regular basis. My favorite field trip was when we went to Dr. Sasha Kauffman’s lab at UCSD and were able to participate various tasks such as brain slicing, looking at kisspeptin cells under a microscope and gel staining.
2. How did you combine your proposed TBH topic to the group’s topic?
When we initially began this project, I was interested in learning about the brain on addiction. This was actually what my proposal was about a while back. Once we were placed in our group we were sort of lost as to how we fit in and decided to represent negative emotions since we felt, that it was represented in our sub topics and we actually continued this way for quite some time. After a while, specifically when we started our little books we began to notice a huge overlap with the depression group and decided that we needed to separate ourselves even more. So we went back to the drawing board and quickly agreed that we would focus on emotions, instead of just negative emotions. This actually changed the game completely and allowed us to focus on so much more. Something that worked well was that all of us were pretty open to anything. No one had a set idea in mind and I think that’s what allowed us to come to a consensus much more quickly. We also made sure that a little bit of each subtopic was being represented in the final theme in order to make it fair and keep everyone interested, as we could still research our own interests.