My experience as a Science and Global Change Scholar has benefitted me immensely as I feel that I have a solid foundation of better understanding concepts such as the hypothetico-deductive method and understand fallacies and the basis of climate change better. I am grateful for the time that I spent in the Scholars program and I am excited to use the knowledge that I obtained from Scholars in the real world. I applied the hypothetico-deductive method in FIRE298 research class when my group and I were writing the proposal for our phenotypic research. We had been working with a bacteria known as Pseudomonas Aeruginosa since the beginning of summer when I had originally started this internship and originally, we were trying to see if we repressed our gene PA14_72650 within Pseudomonas Aeruginosa if there would be decreased biofilm formation and how that would affect the pathogenetic abilities of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa. However, when that experiment didn’t work, we decided to come up with a new experiment. We wanted to see how important and how much of a contributing factor the gene PA14_72650 was within Pseudomonas Aeruginosa to produce the phenazine known as pyocyanin which is a virulence factor with antioxidant properties. Once we developed our hypothesis, we designed an experiment in order to test our theory out and one of our protocols was a Pyocyanin Quantification. My SGC experience prepared me for this experiment, because we talked about the hypothetico-deductive method and we talked in depth about the process of creating the actual experiment itself. We created our hypothesis in such a way that it was falsifiable and then we created an experiment on data that we could keep track of and once getting our results, could come to our own conclusions about the experiments. I encountered a news-related item during my spring semester at UMD in my ENGL101 class. We were assigned to read an article about a woman who was advocating for climate change and she was talking about how her being a black woman made it more difficult for her because people that didn’t believe climate change was real would accuse her of making things up because of her race and if they wanted real information, they wouldn’t believe “someone like her”. It struck my attention because in SGC, we spent a lot of time learning about not only climate change, but certain fallacies that people would use in order to defend themselves and their beliefs. She went on to explain certain concepts that she would present to people and would try to explain the evidence that she had in order to back up her beliefs and argument. However, certain people were extremely stubborn and unreceptive, as they told her, “Well last year was not as hot as this year so therefore global warming and climate change can’t be real.” Even if it were true, they had no real evidence that global warming isn't real. Just saying that the temperature wasn’t as hot as it was the previous year is nothing to go off of. In saying a statement like that, they used the logical fallacy statistics of small numbers. One class that supports my thesis is how we conducted experiments in BSCI161. This is the lab for ecology and evolution and in this class, we wrote multiple hypotheses for multiple experiments. When writing these hypotheses, I followed the method that we discussed in SGC and it honestly made the entire process easier for me. Another class that supports the second part of my thesis was BSCI160. This was a lecture for ecology and evolution. In this class, we had an assignment where we had to argue whether we thought evolution was affected by climate change in any way, and a lot of people said that there was no correlation between climate change and evolution because evolution was inevitable. While that is true, climate change also causes the environment to change around different areas, causing organisms to adapt and survive in those environments. Some mutations that have risen in organisms are considered unnatural, because their descendants are much different than they were, but millions of years ago in order for those organisms to survive, they needed to do whatever they could. My learning was improved by having the opportunity to interact with multiple people within SGC. Last year, a good number of us lived on the fourth floor of the Centreville building, and from the beginning of the year, we had all begun talking and hanging out outside of SGC Colloquium. There were days when we would stand for hours outside in the hallway just talking about what was going on in our lives regarding classes, outside of them, and just anything else that we could think about. One thing that I have done in order to give back to the SGC community is a little while back, I participated in the SGC panel for freshmen. I had the opportunity to talk to freshmen about my internship experience that I completed for the practicum project, which was the FIRE199 class that I completed over the summer. I took the time to talk at this panel, because I wanted to let the freshmen know that there were more ways to complete the practicum than just the traditional way. It was also a great opportunity to introduce them to the FIRE program, which is another program that they could’ve gotten into. Also, the FIRE program has multiple ways to get involved with research through the variety of programs that they offer which is great for anyone interested in a more hands on approach. One thing that changed my belief in SGC was about how easy the website creating process was going to be. I heard from a couple SGC alumni that the website making process was one of the easiest, if not one of the most exciting things that we did in SGC. However, the process was anything but fun for me. There was an error that wouldn’t let me do anything, and I talked to multiple people in the UMD IT Department and no one was able to figure out what had gone wrong. Dr. Merck and myself exhausted ourselves with every possible solution we could until someone from the Geology IT Department figured it out. Needless to say, the process was stressful to say the least. For my future, I will take the lessons that I learned in SGC with me for the rest of my academic and personal life. The way that I have learned to write a hypothesis, deduce false argumentative claims, detect any fallacies that people might use in order to present arguments in front of me. With this, I will be able to write a hypothesis for any of my future experiments, conduct experiments, and will even be able to use what I learned in SGC to help me defend my thesis when I try to obtain my PhD in the coming years. I want to end this 3-semester review by thanking Dr. Holtz and Dr. Merck for their continued support for the past (almost!) two years of my undergraduate college life. I have had an amazing experience in SGC and have enjoyed the lectures and the field trips that were presented to us and I can’t wait to come back and tell them what else I will do not only in UMD, but my plans for the future as well. Thank you Dr. Holtz and Dr. Merck so much!