Invertebrates, Vertebrates, and Plants. Paleontology Of All Kinds is Ok In My Book.
Intent on expanding my understanding paleontology I have had the opportunity to take several courses in different disciplines including both paleobotany, ichthyology, and the evolutionary history of vertebrates leading up to mammals. As I work in a paleobotany lab I am more familiar with that sector, but I decided to take a crack at other topics under the paleo umbrella to broaden my horizons and see if it is something that I would consider studying in the future should I decide to go on to pursue a graduate degree program. I am quite interested in paleontology so I thought it only right to learn as much as I can.
The paleontology community is a tightly knit community in which everyone knows everyone else, more or less. So at UW I often run into people involved in the various different labs in the paleo space and when I got wind that they were offering a course on vertebrates I signed up all but immediately. Just as I spoke on about biology 447, biology 450 and most upper divisional biology courses worth taking are only offered periodically often only once every several years or at the leisure of the professor. As such I was very fortunate to be able to take biology 450 and because I was taking it at the same time as biology 447 there was a great deal of overlap in the people taking both courses. This allowed me to form better relationships with my professors as well as with the other students, most of of which were graduate students as the courses were jointly offered.
These relationships have provided me the opportunity to forge on in my journey to see I would like to study paleontology further as I am now going to Hell Creek Montana this summer to collect fossils with several of the students that I met through the class. These classes helped me not only to better understand the subject matter better, but also about the importance of having people you can rely on in your classes in order to bounce questions off of one another, too bad it only took me three years. I also keep in touch with everyone in the paleo department by attending so called paleo lunch in which a rotating speaker comes in each week to discuss their research.
I am a biology student first and foremost because this is the topic that I find the most compelling out of everything that I could study, but the discipline of biology is so broad that you couldn't possibly study it all. Due to this I think that my niche so to speak that I would like to learn the most about is the evolutionary trajectory of life on earth and this had been the common theme of all the courses that I have taken since I got into the major. Essentially, paleontology is dedicated to studying exactly this which is why I am considering going on to get my PhD on the subject and why this course and biology 447 have been so important to my educational trajectory.
Finally the image that I used to represent biology 450 is of an artistic interpretation of an extinct species called Pachydectes which lived about 250 million years ago during the Permian. The reason for its inclusion is because our final project for the class was to choose a species out of a hat and then create a wikipedia page for it and this was mine.
"I get by with a little help from my friends... I get by with a little help from my friends."