Moment: Friday, May 8th
I graduated!!!
The importance of my major in Biology became increasingly apparent to me as I inched closed to graduation and medical school, because higher level courses tend to take the basic foundational knowledge learned in introductory classes and apply it to the real world. This is precisely what the Texas A&M Learning Outcomes encourage, as they essentially say that students should find the connections between everything they learn, because they are part of a bigger picture that encompasses every piece of knowledge they have acquired during their college education.
This didn’t become real to me until this year, because it simply seemed like I was learning many discrete facts in various classes, and although it should be obvious that in Biology, everything is connected because it is the study of life, I didn’t truly understand how they all intertwined. Biology majors tend to joke that the only thing we remember is that “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” but in reality, I have learned many valuable things while pursuing a degree in Biology that are extremely applicable for real life, but two of them stand out.
The first is how little we actually know as a society. This can be said for many fields, but it is more of a reality check in biology, because we as humans are organisms that require the same things that every other organism needs in order to survive, so it is easy to assume that since we have a understanding of basic necessities for life to exist, we understand life. However, there are so many organisms that challenge even the most fundamental of assumptions, from bacteria that live in scorching volcanoes to parasitic organisms that don’t even have the mitochondria that we all know and love.
This can be a scary notion at first, but it actually brings a lot of hope. If people didn’t know that these organisms could exist against all odds, then there definitely are many other discoveries to be made, like cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s. I had the opportunity to work on hypertension research while I was in undergrad, and it was an incredible feeling to seek out cutting-edge treatments for high blood pressure and discover new things every day. The perfect crop to eradicate world hunger, a way to manufacture water in a lab the way they ground-breakingly made urea to end the water crisis, or a plant that can absorb ten times as much CO2 to clear up our atmosphere are all in the realm of possibility – because we haven’t even come close to reaching the limit of knowledge yet. This means there is hope that COVID-19 will be eradicated, and if that was the only lesson I got from college, I would be happy with that.
The second is the importance of keeping the bigger picture in perspective. In biology class, we learn about emergent properties, which is the idea that one individual unit may not have a characteristic, but many individuals together have properties that only exist when they are a collective unit. A biological example is the heart, because even though the heart is composed of cardiac cells, an individual heart cell does not have the property of pumping blood, but the organ as a whole can pump blood and sustain an organism.
I learned while taking part in medical anthropology research during my study abroad in India, that this concept can be applied to today’s health climate. The last 20-30 years have seen a significant increase in cases of cancer, obesity, heart disease and failure, and mental health issues, to name a few. We are currently living through one of the biggest health crises of our lifetimes, so it is incredibly important to not just look at the individual and try to understand why they are facing their diagnosis, but also look at the social, economic, and environmental conditions to see the overall health implications. The goal is to treat the whole person, not just the ailment.
Deciding to major in biology was largely inspired by my fascination with the intricacies of the human body and my desire to eventually pursue a career in medicine, and over the last three years, I learned a lot of things during the course of my degree that I may not use in a hospital, but will definitely help me be a better physician. Thanks and Gig 'Em TAMU!
