Your final blog entry is due by midnight of this Sunday,
December 11. This is a hard deadline, you need to submit
your final entry by this time. I plan to submit your course grades by
this Monday, December 12.
For your final blog entry, I would like you to write
at least three pages, or at least 900 words. One page (about
300 words or so) should be devoted to a discussion of this week's
presentations by Hunter and Tony. The remaining two or more pages (at
least 600 words) should be a personal essay of what you learned from
this course over the semester. Some topics you could mention in this
part of your blog might be
- What were some scientific highlights of this course in terms of
your learning about biophysics or helping you to decide whether
to major in biophysics? Please give specific examples of these
highlights and explain briefly why you found them
interesting. Are there topics that you feel should be included or
excluded in future classes? Were there topics that were not
mentioned this semester that should be included in future
classes?
- What did you think about the structure of the course in terms of
helping you learn about and think about biophysics? Please give
specific comments about the journal papers, concepts introduced
by papers and presentations, class discussions, end-of-class
questions, and weekly blogs that influenced you one way or the
other.
- Give arguments to support or counter the claim that future Duke
students who like biology and quantitative subjects like physics
and math should major in biophysics rather than stay within one
of the traditional majors such as biology, physics, or chemistry.
- Discuss whether Physics 174S should be changed for future
students. Based on your personal experience, would you recommend
more invited presentations, more student presentations, have some
traditional lectures, have tours of labs, discuss more
applications at the expense of fewer fundamental papers, greater
emphasis on seminar skills like how to present a paper or write a
blog? Would you recommend that 174S be changed to a full-credit
course with 3 hours of classes a week and homework requiring
several hours of effort per week? Please provide details to
support your thoughts.
You do not need to talk about all of the above topics, these are more
to give you a sense of what you could talk about.