My experience in being a Science & Global Change Scholar greatly helped me to understand the foundations of scientific practice and improved my ability to examine the use of scientific knowledge and communication. My time in the SGC program has better prepared me to enter the real world and understand and process the information that is presented before me.
One thing that really struck my attention regarding climate change in the news is how the worsening climate is making it easier for diseases to spread, which has become very relevant since the pandemic started. Few news outlets have covered it, but the ones that have have gone into great detail about how climate change makes us more susceptible to epidemics. One news outlet pointed out that since the globe is heating up, animals from every walk of life are heading for the poles, where they hope to find cooler temperatures. This creates a lot of interactions between animals that would not normally interact with each other, which creates the opportunity for pathogens to find new hosts and spread. In addition to this, another outlet that I saw noted that studies have shown that people in areas with greater amounts of air pollution are more likely to die from covid. As air pollution numbers rise across the globe, the human population is becoming more and more exposed to deadly diseases.
One example of a misunderstanding of the scientific method occurred in a youtube video that I watched where flat-earthers were debating the shape of the earth with distinguished scientists. In the video, one of the flat-earthers made the argument that since gravity is just a “theory”, we should not believe in it so strongly. From my time in scholars, I know that this is a ridiculous argument. A scientific theory is one that has been hypothesized and tested very thoroughly, to the point where it can very rarely be disproved. An enormous amount of effort and time went into testing this theory to determine its validity and how it would hold up under scrutiny. To discount this fact just because it has the term “theory” attached to it is a fallacy of the highest order and a complete misunderstanding of the scientific process.
While the SGC program has taught me a lot about the principles of science and how it should be conducted and distributed, my supporting courses have taught me a lot more about how science and its principles govern our world. For example, the thermodynamics class that I am taking this semester has taught me all about how systems hold heat and how they respond once heat has been introduced. This class has shown me how lots of different thermodynamic properties can be related to each other through lots of different partial derivatives. In addition to thermodynamics, the chemistry labs that I have taken, specifically the organic chemistry 1 lab, have reinforced in me some of the proper scientific processes that are required to get meaningful results from an experiment. There is always a very defined process for every lab that we do, and we must go to great lengths to follow it.
The living-learning community aspect of the SGC program has been a huge boon to my academic career. They have provided many different points of view whenever we talk about global issues in class or discuss the readings that we were assigned. Also, I have met several people that share a few classes with me, and this has really helped me to better learn the content covered in those classes. If not for them, especially last year, I would not have known anyone in those classes and would have had to study for those classes all by myself. Since I met them, I have studied and worked on assignments with them, and I felt like I understood the content much better than I would have if I had not met them.
I believe that I have made an average contribution to the larger scholars community in my time in the program. One of my main contributions was going on the field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City last month. From this field trip, I got to experience the Big Apple for the first time, and I learned a lot about how different species have evolved at the museum from the guided tours that the professors led. On top of that field trip, I also helped to paint a dumpster in the Cambridge community with the art scholars last semester. I spent around 2 and a half hours adding some decals and layers of paint. In addition, I have always contributed my fair share of work to whatever project we were working on in colloquium, whether it be the activity where each nation has to decide how they want to allocate their resources to environmentally friendly projects that we did recently, or the group reading questions that we had to answer about The Sixth Extinction in the last fall semester.
Prior to participating in the SGC program, it was my belief that if enough effort was put into reducing the environmental impact of the human species, we could, in my lifetime, reverse the effects of anthropogenic climate almost entirely. The lectures in SGC have completely erased this naive notion from my mind. I now know that we are at a point where the best that we can hope for, even with massive amounts of energy and resources being allocated to reducing our environmental impact, is to stop the current increase in global temperatures. We as a species have let the problem go unanswered for so long that we can no longer outright solve it, just minimize its effects. It will take an immense amount of money and one to two hundred years for global temperatures to begin to decline after being on a sharp rise for so long. Even though the idea may not be brought to fruition in my lifetime, I want to contribute in any way that I can to stop the rise of temperatures across the globe.
I think that my scholars experience has shaped how I want to live my life in the future and what I want to do in my career. Before scholars, I had never considered how I might want to include environmental impact in my choice of where to work, but it is definitely near the top of my list now. I do not want to work for a company that knowingly wreaks havoc on the environment and actively contributes to worsening the biggest problem faced by my generation. The scholars program has also made me consider getting an electric car when I buy my own car and installing solar panels on the roof of my house when I buy my own house. I want to do what I can to limit my impact on the environment when I am on my own in the real world.