Instructor: Arranged Gentile, Prody, Russo and Anthony-Cahill are commonly sought out as mentors; however, other faculty in Chemistry and Biology have also agreed to act as mentors.
S. Anthony-Cahill can be found in his office (CB440); or by telephone: 650-3152; or by email: sacahill@chem.wwu.edu
Lecture: none. Meetings are arranged between the student and faculty mentor. Students should arrange to work with a faculty mentor the quarter before they intend to register for Chem 405.
Evaluation: Your course grade will be based on one 15-20 page (double spaced) paper that you will write on a biochemical topic of interest to you. Selection of an appropriate topic is done in consultation with the faculty mentor. A number of deadlines for developing the paper are presented below. It is expected that you will meet these deadlines (failure to do so will result in a lowered course grade). To obtain maximum credit in the course I expect that you will meet University writing requirements (e.g. correct spelling and grammar). I will provide critical feedback on your early drafts.
Texts:
There is no required text for this course; however, you may find W.
Strunk and E.B. White “The Elements of Style” (3rd Edition) to be a
useful guide while writing your paper.
Other Useful Resources: You will need
to use online databases to find relevant literature references. The
Source Material: Your primary source for the paper will be the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
I expect that the majority of your bibliographic citations will be journal articles. The WWW is a great source of info but I will not accept a paper written with a majority of web sources because a big part of this exercise involves developing the skill of reading the primary scientific literature. Critical thinking about science requires that you can read and comprehend scientific articles. Reading a summary of the published data may help you to better understand the topic but you run the risk of trusting the interpretation of the author. Be wary of this!
Course deadlines: week II- select topic in consultation with mentor
week IV - abstract due
week VI rough draft due
week VIII - second draft (including figures and bibliography) due
week X - final draft
of paper due
It is imperative that you begin the literature search early. Please see me whenever you encounter difficulties in the development of your paper. I may not be able to offer specific advice but will do what I can to guide you through this process efficiently. Although our library holdings are good, there will be some references that you will need to order from interlibrary loan (expect 5- 10 working days to get the material).
Make note of the use of figures. A picture is often worth more than 10e3 words. It is difficult to follow a line of reasoning without context. Diagrams and clearly written text go a long way toward alleviating confusion.