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Hi, my name is Clara Davie and I am an assistant professor of biology with the department of
Math and Natural Sciences. Introduction to Biology is a broad survey course of everything
in biology. We're taking that book learning, so all of the readings that you guys do for
homework, and all the lectures that you sit through, and then going out into the field
and actually applying those techniques. So learning how to take what you read in the
book and seeing it real life in front of you in the lab. Our students work in groups of,
as small as two to as large as four. You'll work on projects in lab together and some
are out of lab together, so it really helps the students bond and get to know each other,
which is great for a freshman class. This year we took our students out to Forest Lawn
Cemetery, which is a really old and historic cemetery in the Buffalo area, to create life
tables. So a life table is really neat, and what it does is ,for a certain group of people,
it lets you know what your probability is of surviving to your next birthday. We use
this to study population dynamics, so how a certain population has changed over time.
And they have to scour the cemetery and collect data on a hundred and fifty individuals. And
then we took this information back to the lab, and then they came up with hypotheses
as to why certain groups died at certain ages, and they looked into the history of what was
going on at the time, and came up with some really neat conclusions. So my goal for my
students when they leave Intro Bio is to have their initial interest in biology to really
blossom into a love for it.