Seniors present at senior capstone.
CATHERINE DIAKOU/THE QUADRANGLE
By Catherine Diakou, Staff Writer
Manhattan College’s senior biology majors celebrated their year-long research at the capstone presentation event that took place at the end of March. After spending many hours on their chosen topic, students were able to honor the work of their classmates as well as themselves.
Bruce Shockey, Ph.D., has been mentoring these students through each of their individual studies.
“They’ve been doing a lot of work, and suffering to some degree and now this, nobody’s suffering today, there’s just joy,” Shockey said.
Senior biology major Ava Cruz, has been studying her chosen topic for the entire school year along with her classmates.
“You start day one; you start the first day of senior year talking about the process and everything,” Cruz said.
The course catalog breaks down this required class, labeling its aim as an investigation of the entire research process.
According to manhattan.edu, the class involves,“Training in reading and comprehension of scientific papers, understanding statistical analysis issues, constructing a reference section, [and] writing for science and power-point construction issues.”
Shockey went in-depth on the purpose behind such a time-consuming project.
“We want our graduates to have experience doing literature reviews, searching literature on the topic, picking a topic, writing it up, and knowing it well enough to then communicate it visually and verbally,” Shockey said. “I learned as a teacher, often I learn things better [by] teaching. Today they are teaching us about their project.”
While this aids the end of their academic career here at MC, it is also beneficial for their future endeavors in research.
“This is a good kind of microcosm of what happens with professional scientists, they go to meetings and they have poster sessions and talks, they communicate in that way,” Shockey said. “Some person you would never socialize with, all of a sudden you [can] have this weird interest that you and them can talk about and nobody else.”
Cruz dedicated her time to researching the genetic factors of the neurodevelopment of individuals with autism spectrum disorder.
“It’s a really really complex condition, so there’s a lot of answers as to what causes it,” Cruz said. “There’s a lot of different symptoms and you see a lot of different presentations, where some people are higher functioning, or they’re savant. And then there is very low functioning, [where] there are people that are non-verbal. How does that happen biologically?”
Following graduation this May, Cruz is headed to pursue a career furthering her research of autism spectrum disorder.
“I am going to have a job at the MGH Larry Learning Center for Autism,” Cruz said. “It’s an outpatient psychiatric unit where they treat people with all different types of neurological disabilities such as autism from womb to tomb, and they are the only outpatient clinic that does that, which is really exciting.”
Seeing the finished projects and the part that research played in students such as Cruz’s future plans is what the capstone project is all about.
“Completing something like this is the social aspect of science,” Shockey said. “These things don’t look that impressive on their little computer screens, but when you project it like that, it’s a big deal.”