ONE OF THE COLLEGE OF LIFE SCIENCES’ PRIORITIES is to support the university’s strategic objective to advance student-centered research and scholarship in the light of President Worthen’s Inspiring Learning initiative. In his book Creating Significant Learning Experiences, L. Dee Fink wrote, “For learning to occur there has to be some kind of change in the learner. No change, no learning. And significant learning requires that there be some kind of lasting change that is important in terms of the learner’s life.” In this edition of Impact, you will read about instances where students report that their lives were forever changed by the outside-of-the-classroom experiences they had in pursuit of their degrees. One student doing research in Antarctica changed his view of education to include a lifelong learning component. Another student participating in symptomatic COVID-19 testing at BYU changed her understanding of her chosen career, medical laboratory science, to include caring and serving the community, not just running lab tests. Another student who participated in a marine biology field trip to the west coast changed his goal to go to medical school and replaced it with a desire to pursue marine biology further. I hope you enjoy reading about these experiences and others like them. The disciplines in the college lend themselves well to significant mentored research or mentored learning experiences for our students. We hope these experiences truly change the students’ lives in inspiring ways.
Fink, D.L. Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, p. 30, 2003