User talk:Sarah Carratt

Week 2 Journal Feedback

• Thanks for making some of the requested changes to your User page. However, I do still strongly suggest that you move your tables of links to the weekly assignments and your individual and shared journal pages over to your template. Also you should add the category "BIOL398-01/S11" to your template. That way, each time you create an individual journal assignment, you can add just your template to that page and all of your links will be there automatically.

Week 1 Journal Feedback

• Thank you for submitting your assignment on time.
• Your assignment is complete with a couple of minor omissions/suggestions:
  • Please let us know if you have any worries or concerns about the course or if there is anything else you want us to know. If the answers to these questions are "no", then please let us know that as well.
  • You have completed all of the wiki skills, I have a couple of suggestions for improving your page:
    • For your external link to the Passions magazine, use the magazine title as the label for your hyperlink so that you hide the URL. It's OK the way it is, but it will make your paragraph look nicer if you do it this way.
    • Ditto for your link to your PDF schedule. It will look nicer with a label instead of seeing the wiki syntax for the link.
    • For your Week 1 Assignment, you linked to the Class Journal Page. For this first week of class, we didn't have an individual assignment because it was to create your User Page, but for subsequent weeks, you will have an individual journal page to link to. You can create a separate table of links for the Class Journals to make that distinction clear. Also, you could add this table of links to your template so that anytime you use your template on subsequent journal assignments, it will make your life easier. You could also add your Categories to your template so that it will automatically be added each time you use your template.

— Kam D. Dahlquist 18:45, 17 January 2011 (EST)

Responses to Instructor Questions

You asked: "Hey there Dr. Fitzpatrick! How did you become interested in biology and math? What inspired you to teach both? Sarah Carratt 16:58, 16 January 2011 (EST) "

I answered: Ben G. Fitzpatrick 17:19, 16 January 2011 (EST) My dad's a veterinarian, so I have long experience in "applied biology," especially biological waste products. I went to college planning to study engineering, but I found math (and the math professors) a lot more interesting. I returned to an interest in biology as a grad student. My adviser was collaborating with some biologists and agricultural engineers, and those problems were very cool. When I came to LMU, the math department was eager to re-energize biomathematics, and the faculty in bio seemed interested in collaborating. In both disciplines, puzzling out the structure and function of things is at the heart of inquiry. Such questions always seem to draw me in. Bringing biology concepts into math courses seems very natural to me in that regard.

You asked: "Hey Dr. Dahlquist!! Why did you choose to co-teach a math class instead of merely staying in the field of biology? Sarah Carratt 16:56, 16 January 2011 (EST)"

I answered: The short answer is that Dr. Fitzpatrick and I do research together and we were both interested in sharing our common interest with students in a class. As to why I am interested in biomathematics in the first place, the field that I work in has become math-intensive in order to analyze and model the data. What we are able to do by combining our efforts in biology and mathematics is much greater than what either of us would be able to achieve alone using just biology or mathematics. Research is becoming more and more interdisciplinary as the problems get larger and larger and require expertise from different areas to solve. — Kam D. Dahlquist 18:53, 17 January 2011 (EST)