The Interaction Between Science ("Truth") and Meaning ("Interpretation")

 

This section contains a collection of writings that attempt to reflect on what has driven me as a writer thus far in my academic career. As a biology major and pre-med student, I have been inundated with science courses over the past four years. While I greatly enjoy learning about how the world actually works, another of my core attributes as a student is trying to puzzle out why it works in the way it does--what it all means in the context of the overall human experience. My writing career has been characterized by a struggle between these two deep-seated curiosities, and the pieces contained within this section attempt to explain this. The "Evolution Essay", which I wrote for the Capstone seminar for my Minor in Writing, contains the most explicit explanation of this struggle, while the "Why I Write", completed during the Gateway seminar for this Minor over two years ago, represents more of a starting point for my idealism as a science student. The latter piece is less focused on the specific conflict between science and meaning, but its overall theme of "opening eyes and minds" with my writing demonstrates the base from which my desire to question the deeper meaning of science evolved from.

 

The other sections of this portfolio contain clear-cut examples of how I tried to reconcile these two opposing forces throughout my undergraduate career; in many cases, the limitations of a specific class forced me to slant my style of writing towards one of the two ends of the spectrum. The "Scientific" page harbors examples of those writings that left me yearning to describe some deeper implications into the natural process I was explaining, while the "Interpretive" page shows some of the pieces that were perhaps too focused on trying to find meaning, to the detriment of the actual science.

 

Finally, the "Syntheic" page contains just one piece: my final attempt to perfectly balance science and interpretation in an investigation of the nature of human self-awareness, in the form of my Capstone Project.