At some point in their Washington University career, every undergraduate student will be required to fulfill a natural sciences (or natural sciences and mathematics, if you’re in the College of Arts and Sciences or Sam Fox School) requirement. Unfortunately for many, including myself, the process of finding the right class (and getting through it) is arduous and stressful. Given the incredibly challenging nature of our introductory courses in biology and chemistry, the majority of non-science students are driven to look for peripheral science courses that deal with science from a distance. While the current offerings may be suitable for much of the student body, I argue that Wash. U. is not fully maximizing on the potential it has to provide all students with a positive experience in the natural and life sciences. By adding more classes that actually address scientific topics and are built for non-science students, Wash. U. can begin to increase student interest in our more foundational sciences.

The physical and life sciences requirement in the business school can be fulfilled by a variety of courses, including Writing the Natural World; Geology of National Parks; Introduction to Global Climate Change; Introduction to Human Evolution; Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology, as well as most biology, chemistry and physics courses. Unfortunately, the majority of these classes are very limited in their examination of sciences and do not have lab requirements or even assignments outside of regular exams. Human evolution is an example of an important scholarly topic, but at Wash. U., it is taught as a 100-level anthropology course. A current student in the course explains that while the lectures are interesting, the class is comparable to high school introductory biology and only “deals with science very briefly.” In the class, there are three graded multiple choice exams and one fossil lab worth only 5 percent of the total class grade, which means that students have little incentive to analyze and apply the material past what is required on tests.

Dr. Sarrah Dunham-Cheatham, a lecturer in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, was kind enough to offer her perspective on the science requirement in colleges and peripheral science courses. In her discussions with senior undergraduate and graduate students, she has learned that the students agree that the science requirement offerings are too difficult and designed to be “weed out” courses and would prefer to see a better selection of 100-level courses “geared for various groups of students.”

However, as an instructor, she argues that this proposed solution “puts a lot of extra pressure and demand on departments to offer more courses than they may be able to offer given their faculty load and availability.” In addition, she believes that peripheral courses may be the only way to provide a science experience for the University-wide requirement: “Easy courses are not typical in science, of any kind…You must ask questions that determine if the student can use the correct answer or a complex concept and apply it to another situation.”

While I understand these points of conjecture, Wash. U. still has a responsibility to offer more classes that directly address the fundamental topics of science.

I was lucky enough to take Environmental Issues to fulfill my science requirement—the class, taught by Dunham-Cheatham, is a 100-level class that blends the very basic foundations of biology, chemistry and physics to look at the variety of issues impacting the natural world today. It is a great example of what I envision for the science requirement at Wash. U. The University should look to the physics, chemistry and biology departments, which have historically heavily limited their non-prerequisite classes, in order to roll this out on a larger scale.

Currently, the Department of Biology is closest to an ideal compromise—they offer small freshman seminars on topics including Introduction to Problem-Based Learning in Biology and Genetics and Behavior of Dog Breeds. In periodically offering these kinds of classes to the larger student body, the departments could not only increase their visibility on campus, but also drive students towards a greater appreciation of science. By creating a middle ground between classes like General Chemistry and Geology of National Parks, the science requirement can become a more integrated portion of the Wash. U. undergraduate education.