Throughout my time in College Park Scholars, and especially in the Science and Global Change program, I have learned a lot and have been able to use what I have learned outside of colloquium. Throughout my three semesters in SGC, I have been able to apply the hypothetico-deductive method to things outside of colloquium. Although I can't necessarily provide a specific example, I can say that I use this method when coding for my computer science classes. As a computer science major, we are taught how to analyze and debug code so that our code achieves its desired result as efficiently as is possible. In doing so, we implicitly use the hypothetico-deductive method in order to determine what would work in terms of correctly and efficiently implementing our code. We make observations about how the code is running (whether it compiles, whether it returns the expected result, etc.) and from there try to determine what is causing the issue and how to fix it or make it more efficient. So in a not so obvious way, I was able to improve upon my coding and learn how to debug my code better through the hypothetico-deductive method.
In terms of events over the past three semesters, I remember back in January of this year when wildfires were really starting to spring up on the west coast and especially in Australia. It struck my attention due to how common and lasting these wildfires were becoming, and ultimately the devastation and displacement that they resulted in, both for humans and animals. The California wildfire back in August was further confirmation of this. While wildfires do occur naturally for various reasons such as lightning, climate change can be attributed as a major reason as to why they increased in number. While I feel like I understood how wildfires could be attributed to global warming, which dries out vegetation and also increases the likelihood of drought, and how it also adds to global warming through the further addition of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through the burning of vegetation, SGC helped me understand the context behind how the continuous addition of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the Industrial Revolution onwards contributed to a current planetary state which is more prone to natural events such as wildfires, as well as how although there may be more direct causes, you can attribute the increase in this phenomenon to human activity.
Being in a living-learning environment such as the one within College Park Scholars and specifically Science and Global Change helped me in many ways. My roommate during freshman year and I were the same major as well as the same cohort, so we were able to help each other in terms of assignments as well as studying and understanding content. I was also able to find other people within SGC that I became close with in various ways, whether we were in the same clubs or we were in study groups together. And we as a class even helped each other out, whether through the GroupMe or such as that time where a couple of us were helping people with HTML in our lounge. Overall, the living-learning experience fostered by the program helped develop an environment where I as well as others could collaborate and ultimately perform well from an academic standpoint.
I actively participated and contributed to SGC through field trips and discussions, and honestly not much else. As far as non-academic activity was concerned, I did try to take part in what was going on in the Cambridge community when we were still attending class physically. For example, I attended the game night at the beginning of freshman year and also would check out the different times they offered snacks and drinks or had dogs out. I also went on the field trip to New York during my first semester, and I was able to gain a lot from that experience, not only academically from the American Museum of Natural History, but also from being able to walk around the city (or at least Times Square) and explore it, whether through sightseeing, eating local food, etc. I also actively participated in the social experience that is also supposed to come with being in College Park Scholars and SGC, whether it be going to events like previously mentioned or the constant interaction between fellow Scholars as well as the friendships that came out of them. While I do feel like I participated less as we transitioned to online classes, I still was able to have good discussions during class with classmates about the various topics we discussed over the semester.
I don't know if I was introduced to ideas or people that had challenged previously held beliefs that I had. One idea that I found to be interesting, however, is the idea of the possibility of coincidences or happenstances when considering an occurrence. I found it weird considering how we aren't usually taught to explain something as a coincidence, as we are more inclined to try and find the reason why something happened or why something is as it is. However, we do have to remember that nature is in itself random, and so it shouldn't be as surprising as it ends up being when some events thought to be related to one another ends up being a coincidental phenomenon.
I think that one thing that I will be able to draw from these past three semesters is the lesson on logical fallacies and how they are often used and how to recognize them. In my future endeavors, in my undergraduate and potentially graduate studies, as well as in my professional career, I feel that it will be very necessary to recognize these fallacies in order to properly defend any argument or stance presented given the situation. I also remember when we measured our carbon footprint even as college students, and from there I learned not only how detrimental certain actions were to the environment, as well as how easy it would be to leave a significant impact in the amount of carbon I produce by changing some simple things, and I will try to implement those things in my everyday life moving forward. I also was very interested in all of the different methods that have been developed and/or theorized in order to reduce carbon emissions, and I am interested in seeing how those things are implemented in the future, and I think it would be pretty cool if I were able to make some type of impact as a computer science major and hopeful software engineer in order to help see those things through.