My experience as a SGC scholar has helped me critically think about science in the news, better understand research applications as well as the many impacts climate change has on our world. Throughout the course we have learned how to not only read and understand research but learn how to identify fallacies these reports might contain. Through a critical lens honed through this class I have been able to spot flaws being taught in other classes as well. In one of my human development classes we had an assignment to look through research papers in order to synthesize a paper. In examining these papers I noticed a few had clear biases and logical fallacies. Thanks to the class I was able to identify them and ignore them for my paper in order to have a sound evidence backed paper. Another aspect of SGC I am grateful for is the way it helped me change my perspective on how I can use my major in biology to help with climate change. Throughout the past three semesters we learned about science's impact on the world and even democracy as a whole. I learned how the changes in climate greatly affect the ecosystem and can cause massive ripple effects as well as the inability to reverse these effects. It has helped me shift my mindset from finding a solution to finding a way to adapt and reduce and preserve our environment. With my major I now want to find ways to help species better adapt to rising temperatures and find ways to help support agriculture that can survive rising temperatures in order to ensure food as our planet goes through massive temperature changes. We also learned about several biological solutions for carbon sequestration that can help reduce the carbon in the atmosphere. Working on a project like this would be incredibly inspiring and I would not have learned about it if not for the SGC curriculum. One class I took because of scholars, AREC 200, The Chesapeake Bay Ecosystem: Intersection of Science, Economics and Policy, particularly shaped my view on the environment and the impacts especially at a local level. This class was truly eye opening because it explored the impacts climate change had on such a local level that hit particularly close to home. This helped me understand the effect the individual can have on the environment. It also opened my eyes to the way the urbanization of the world can lead to many widespread harmful effects. Another great thing about this class is how it enhanced one of my SGC excursions when we went to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation Headquarters. Since I already had a strong background in the bay thanks to the class when we went on the excursion I was able to make strong connections between what I learned about the bay and the esterification of the bay to what was being explained at the excursion. This made the experience that much more valuable and entertaining. Overall my impact on Scholars as a whole was not as impactful as I might have hoped, but I still do think I was able to make an impact overall. I always enjoyed discussions and being able to interact with the other students. I always found myself learning new perspectives and think I was able to provide my own unique perspective as well. I also really enjoyed our service project at the beginning of the year. It was exciting to both see the positive impact as we cleaned and built pathways as well as bond with the other students. This bonding with the students was vital for me and it led to me forming wonderful friendships with other scholars. I really appreciated these friendships as it brought me together with people who I might not have met otherwise. This truly opened my eyes to different perspectives. One that stands out to me is the way people shared the way how the grew up helped determine their own perspective of climate change and what it meant to them. All of my friends had different reasons and draws to the topic and learning really opened my eyes to the broad way climate change can affect people and unite people under a common cause. I think one of the biggest takeaways from scholars that I will take into my future will be the way science alone cannot fix problems in our society. It takes cooperation and global efforts to make wide spread impacts that we often desire. This has made me want to work more with people and make connections with people in various fields and backgrounds. Alone it is hard to accomplish sihc a big feat but with help from others you accomplish so much more.
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