A Career Influencing Experience

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I believe that the first day at school in my sophomore year was a career influencing factor for me. I had enrolled myself for honors biology class. Every upperclassman I knew warned me the instructor of the class, Mr. DeBacco was a “Hard Quiz Giver”, “Tough Grader” and getting a good grade in that class is tantamount to finding God on Earth. Okay. So the first slideshow for the class started with the title, “Day 1: What did I get myself into?” I will be honest I was nervous after reading this. Moreover, he gave us a quiz on the very first day of class. The pace of the class was hard to keep up with. Mr. DeBacco emphasized on paying attention to specific details on the slideshows. The first lab of the class was Seed Germination. We were expected to write a full and academic lab report. I had never written this type of lab report. Thus. I did what a normal teenager of the Google Era would do. I looked it up and started writing my lab report. I admit that it was the hardest writing I ever did. The language had to be scientific, in past tense and no first person. Through, this class I learned to write good lab reports like a true researcher. I saw a huge difference in the initial lab reports and the lab reports I wrote in the second semester. On the academic part of the class, we learned complex and core topics in biology like the Central Dogma of Biology, Biotechnology, Mendelian, Evolution, and Alternation of Generations, Photosynthesis and Human Anatomy and Genetics, Evolution and Darwin’s Theory, Hardy and Weinberg Principle, Plant Physiology. While learning Human Anatomy I was able to relate this to real life Another, fun aspect of this class was the Biology Field trip to a local beach. As my father was experiencing some liver complications. So learning about gastroenterology was useful in understanding my father’s medical condition. I loved the field trip but we had to complete a ten pages beach field trip packet with AP class level questions. That was an aha moment! Fun with no work was impossible in this class. Another fun packet with AP class level questions. That was an aha moment! Fun with no work day in this class was the Dissection Day. As a class, we were expected to dissect a frog, a rat, and a crayfish! Dissecting a rat was something I would never do in my life. But as an aspiring genetic engineer, I had to learn to deal with rats as many types of researches go around them. So I asked my lab partner for help and we did it. I was not able to look at it. The mere sight of a dead rat irked me out. And after the dissection, Mr. DeBacco assigned us a final lab report. An 11-page lab somehow I managed to write it first in the class. An event report with a paragraph explaining the anatomy of the animals we dissected. And then came finals. That scared me more than anything. I studied hard. And of course, it was a cumulative exam. On the day of the final; walking out of the class, made me develop research and lab report writing skills. And I will always owe all this think about all the challenges I faced in the class and how they developed me as a person in whole. I was able to understand the difference between surface learning and digging deep to learn something.


Note: If you are a person who likes to accept challenges and develop in response to them check

this link out. This link includes Mr. DeBacco YouTube channel with helpful and

intriguing biology concept videos.


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