SENDForC, Bayanihan Clinic and Youth In Dentistry representatives share their experiences from being involved

    For many new students, a new chapter has just opened in their book of life as they step foot on the UC Davis campus. Perhaps lost and yearning for connection following a year of virtual classes and interaction, students can look forward to joining many different science or pre-health clubs this year as many of the organizations are transitioning back to in-person this fall quarter. 

    Recently established as the Davis Chapter of the organization about a year ago, SENDForC provides an opportunity to meet like-minded undergraduates who are passionate in STEM subjects, and are eager to create and host workshops and mentorship programs for underprivileged high schools across the nation. Bryan Kuo, a rising third-year at UC Davis and one of the co-leads for the Biology and Chemistry Committee, explains why he joined this student-led organization, reflecting on his experiences as a high school student.

    “Throughout highschool, I attended STEM summer programs to explore my interests in more specific science-related fields,” Kuo said. “While these programs were very helpful, they usually cost a fair amount of money, making them less accessible for some students. With the desire to provide a similar learning experience free-of-charge for all high school students, I joined SENDforC’s Biology/Chemistry Committee to help SENDforC design and teach workshops in Biology and Chemistry. Others should join SENDforC if they are interested in helping to make STEM education and higher education more accessible for students of all backgrounds.” 

    The committee has already hosted a few virtual yet interactive workshops on subjects such as immunology, genetic engineering and neurophysiology. This fall, the organization is looking to bring the workshops to high school students in areas near Davis.

    Pre-health club students have the opportunity to engage in volunteer work to help patients at Bayanihan Clinic, one of the student-run clinics at UC Davis. Roland Del Mundo, an undergraduate coordinator for Bayanihan Clinic, explains the clinic’s goals and work.

    “Bayanihan Clinic provides accessible primary and preventative care to Filipino immigrants and all diverse, underserved communities of the Greater Sacramento area, while honoring the legacy of Filipino veterans through advocacy and community engagement,” Del Mundo said. “During clinic days, undergraduate clinic interns manage the clinic flow while assisting medical students and doctors with patients. Bayanihan provides specialty services including Vision Services, Diabetes Empowerment Program, Healthy Breast Program and Wellness Services. In addition to the clinical aspect, our clinic performs outreach events catered towards our veteranos that raise awareness about Filipinx heritage.”

Despite the clinic’s competitive application and rigorous commitment of three consecutive quarters for students, Del Mundo has learned to cherish the skills and appreciate the experience as a leader of the clinic’s mission.

“One thing that I have learned in my time in Bayanihan is how to deliver culturally sensitive healthcare,” Del Mundo said. “This includes using active listening, critical thinking and proper communication to ensure that we understand our patients needs and are providing the best possible care we can to our diverse group of patients. Seeing the positive changes we are making in our community has been fulfilling and has strengthened my dedication toward caring for the lives of others.” 

For students pursuing a dental career, Youth in Dentistry is a newly established club in the Davis area for pre-dental undergraduate students to guide those passionate about dentistry and looking to attend dental school in the future. Isabel Caymo, one of the co-presidents who helped start the Davis chapter for Youth in Dentistry, describes the club’s purpose and how they flourished during the pandemic. 

“Youth in Dentistry at UC Davis was created during quarantine as a virtual-based platform used to provide information and resources regarding everything dentistry-related,” Caymo said. “Through this main purpose, we also aim to create a tight-knit pre-dental community within all of our students and members. We have hosted numerous Instagram takeovers with pre-dental students, dental students and dentists where they take us through a day in their lives. Our other projects consist of creating DAT questions of the day where our followers can interact to test their knowledge and researching and producing informational posts regarding dentistry topics.”

Fellow Co-President of Youth in Dentistry Brinda Prothia shares what she has gained from being a part of the club along with leading the club’s operations.

“I have been able to network with multiple dental students, UCD alumni, etc. all through the power of social media,” Prothia said via email. “I have also learned more about different specialities of Dentistry as well as all the important components of the Dental Application. And last but not least, I have found my community here where there are so many like-minded students like me who share the same passion for the field of Dentistry.”

Written by: Brandon Nguyen – science@theaggie.org

From working at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain to the UC Davis Medical Center, students are engaged in STEM research across the board

    According to the 2021 University of California Accountability Framework, 34% of university-wide seniors reported assisting faculty in conducting research. Research is an integral part of UC Davis, and students have the opportunity to receive hands-on research experience.

    Since November 2020, Dua Haryanawalla, a third-year majoring in psychology, has been an undergraduate research assistant at the Mangun Laboratory for Neural Mechanisms of Attention, located in the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain.  

    “I had experience before doing research,” Haryanawalla said. “But, it was a different kind of experience. It wasn’t one where I was working in the lab. I really wanted to gain that experience because it aligns with my major. I wanted to see if research was something I wanted to pursue going forward.” 

    Haryanawalla landed this position through a friend who connected her to a graduate student looking to recruit an undergraduate student position in their lab. 

    “My friend had already joined a position in the laboratory,” Haryanawalla said. “I was telling him how I wanted to do research, and I had reached out to professors [outside of UC Davis], and haven’t heard back from many. [I thought] maybe it would be better if [I reached out] within the university.” 

    Haryanawalla is analyzing data sets from recordings of the electroencephalogram (EEG) and the responses evoked by them, called event-related potentials (ERPs). 

    “MATLab is a programming tool that we use to analyze EEG and ERP trials, which is a type of data set we collect,” Haryanawalla said. “The focus of this research is to monitor attention span.” 

    Haryanawalla said that before coming into this position, she was familiar with Python, a programming language which she had learned through ECS 32A: “Introduction to Programming,” but she didn’t have much hands-on experience. However, she emphasized that she was ready to learn, and that’s what Haryanawalla has been doing with MATLab through this position ever since. 

    Fourth-year cognitive science major Shefali Bhagath is working six to nine hours a week as an undergraduate research assistant at the Memory and Development Lab, led by principal investigator Dr. Simona Ghetti, which is also housed in the Center for Mind and Brain. 

    One day, Bhagath stumbled across her research opportunity at the Memory and Development Lab when viewing a newsletter sent by the Department of Psychology via email. 

    “At the [Memory and Development Lab], we run a longitudinal study with children,” Bhagath said. “We bring them into our lab, play with them to get them adjusted and then we run our studies — which are a bunch of little games and tasks in a few rooms within our lab. I also do database input. We take all of their information from the surveys that we have the parents fill out, and we go ahead and put it into spreadsheets.” 

Bhagath is also simultaneously working at the UC Davis Medical Center in the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine. 

    “I am a premedical student. I wanted some more type of clinical research, since [my work at the Memory and Development Lab] isn’t clinical research,” Bhaghat said.  

    To find this opportunity, Bhaghat scrolled through job opportunities on Handshake. 

At the UC Davis Medical Center, Bhagath runs a variety of studies inside the operating room and inside the ICU units at the hospital. Bhagath said her success stems from foundational skills — like strong communication and willingness to do whatever is at hand — which she refined through her position as a dance coach in high school.

“You can pull these types of skills, from any type of extracurricular you’ve ever done in your life,” Bhagath said. “It doesn’t have to be just skills you think are only required for research. There are so many interpersonal skills that go into research because you are working with peers, graduate students, professors and doctors.”

Bhagath said that the skills that she’s gathered through these research positions propelled her to gain leadership positions in clubs like Women in Science Society at UC Davis.  

    Similar to Bhagath, third-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major Rebecca Chu wanted to find a research opportunity that would integrate patient interaction. 

    “I wasn’t really particular as to which department or which lab [I wanted to work in],” Chu said. “I applied to whatever interested me. I knew I didn’t want to just do data analysis. I wanted [my research] to involve patient interaction.” 

    Last spring quarter, Chu joined the UC Davis Medical Center’s Division of Infectious Diseases as an undergraduate research assistant. 

    “One of the main studies that I am doing right now is related to COVID-19,” Chu said. “I help the study coordinator screen patients; for each study there is a requirement for what type of patient we can take [for clinical studies] and what type of patient we can’t take. We get to see their chart on the computer and go through the protocol.”   

    Now, Chu is able to comprehensively read patient charts and watch her research coordinator interact with the patients enrolled in the clinical study. 

    Third-year double major in French and neurobiology, physiology and behavior Margo Le is working in the Center of Immunology and Infectious Diseases as an undergraduate student researcher, under principal investigator Dr. Nicole Baumgarth.  

    “For me, I’ve always been more interested in the research side,” Le said. “I want to go toward the graduate/Ph.D. course after my Bachelors. At first, I just wanted to get a look at what research consisted of and have an idea of what I could be getting myself into to decide to go to academics. That’s why I looked at some of the research labs here.”

    Le said that since joining, she has learned techniques for working with in vivo mice and how to use enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). 

    “Dr. Baumgarth’s lab works on the different aspects of immunology, including [what would happen” if we take one aspect out, and how that would influence the immune response,” Le said. “The grad student that I am working under is working on the FCMR. She works with transgenic mice to see how it would affect its response to the influenza virus.”

At the beginning, Le was completing basic tasks like paperwork. Now, she is doing a part of Dr. Baumgarth’s project. 

    “She trusts me enough to do actual lab work by myself without her being there,” Le said. “It comes with time.”       

    Haryanawalla, Bhagath, Chu and Le all agree on one thing: taking a chance on research has enriched their academic experiences on the UC Davis campus. 

Written by: Aarya Gupta — science@theaggie.org  

Increased frequency of open-note exams due to virtual classes results in mixed opinions among students 

Is it B or C? B or C? The multiple-choice answers toggle back-and-forth in your mind as you glance up at the clock to see that there are only two minutes remaining. This exam is worth 60% of your grade, and you know you remember writing down the answer to this question in your notebook last week—but the test is strictly closed-note. Frustrated, you close your eyes and try to picture that page, willing the answer to appear in your mind, but it refuses, so you choose at random and give up, pressing ‘Submit’ and closing your laptop before you have to watch the Canvas confetti mock you.

The logistics of exams were a bit different this year, with virtual classes making cheating methods much more obtainable. As a result, many professors opted for open-note tests in order to level the access to information, a change that students had a variety of opinions on. 

Fifth-year cognitive science major Bryce Joseph-Nelson stated he had almost exclusively closed-note tests before the pandemic, although students were sometimes allowed a single notecard to include some information on. In contrast, throughout the pandemic, almost all of his classes had open-note exams. However, he found this new pattern to have certain flaws.

“What I found a little bit frustrating was that a lot of my open-note tests were classes that were all memorization classes, and it felt as if I could just give up on actually learning the material at that point,” Joseph-Nelson said. “Like, I will look this up regardless of if I know it or not, just to triple-check, so I think it takes away a little bit of the pressure to learn it initially.”

Brandon Lu, a fourth-year economics major, also talked about his experience with testing this year. 

“All of my tests were open note,” Lu said via Discord. “The main constraint of tests I had were time constraints, and differentiated tests to prevent cheating. For the most part, all of my classes took [an] ‘as long as it’s your own work, I don’t care how you get the answer’ approach to class.”

Lu expressed a somewhat different opinion than Joseph-Nelson regarding the change. 

“I do feel less stressed out with open note tests, because I have a life line in the form of notes,” he said via Discord. “The feeling is akin to going into a duel armed with a sword, and having notes is like having armor. Whether you’re victorious is still up to you, but the odds are a little more in your favor.”

In order to contextualize memory as it is tied to learning, Charan Ranganath, a professor in the Department of Psychology, as well as the director of the Memory and Plasticity program, offered an explanation of short-term memory (STM) versus long-term memory (LTM). 

“These terms mean different things to different people, but the way memory researchers use them is to say that LTM is your store of memories for events, and knowledge about the world, and STM is the ability to control and use information in LTM, along with information from the outside world, in order to accomplish a goal,” Ranganath said via email. 

In addition to his work as a researcher, he described his experience with tests this year as a professor.

“The pandemic made me double down on using quizzes and testing as a learning and retention tool,” Ranganath said via email. “The major challenge with online instruction has been to balance learning with the significant issues that students faced during the pandemic. I had to be flexible for people who didn’t have regular internet access, so students had lots of time to complete the tests, and we couldn’t be around to monitor students to minimize cheating.”

    He went on to say that because of a desire to give students who followed the rules equal opportunity to those who cheated, he made all exams and quizzes open-note. 

“I feel that it really reduced the effectiveness of the tests as learning tools, but at the end of the day, it was more important to me to consider the students’ perspective,” Ranganath said via email. “Many students were understandably stressed to the point of near collapse, and giving them flexibility really made a difference in helping them stay afloat. But I would want things to be more challenging in the future because that dramatically increases how much students will learn.”

As UC Davis transitions back into in-person instruction in the fall, this unintentional pandemic experiment in widespread open-note exams may no longer be necessary. But if the goal is to encourage effective learning to the highest degree, is the long-term solution to stick to closed-note tests, or to try something new?

“I would like for open note tests to continue, and to further the idea, I would like any change that takes the pressure off high impact, short time duration assignments, which are mostly tests,” Lu said via Discord.

Joseph-Nelson offered a point in favor of the open-note format, acknowledging that with the widespread availability of the internet it’s a much more realistic approach. However, he also gave the opinion that test-taking in general may not be the best learning format. 

“I feel like the classes in which I have the best retention are always the classes in which there’s some kind of project or something like that, where I have to actually engage with information and present it in a cohesive package,” Joseph-Nelson said. “That’s always been how I keep information best, looking back.”

However, Ranganath emphasized that many studies have been done highlighting the benefits of test-taking in the learning process. 

    “A lot of research suggests that tests can play a crucial role in helping you retain more information,” Ranganath said via email. “Tests shouldn’t be about evaluating students, they should be a learning tool! In general, the more you have to struggle to pull up the right information, the more effective that test is going to be to help you retain it. So, closed-note tests should be much, much better for retention. The catch is, if you get it wrong, you need feedback so that you learn the right answer. So, ideally you’d either see the right answer shortly after you make your response, or you’d get to consult your notes right after a question.” 

Ranganath further explained how this might play out in a real classroom environment, recognizing nuance in how different methods might work best for different subject matters.

“Testing is known to be good for retaining specific pieces of information like, say, vocabulary words for your Spanish class,” Ranganath said via email. “It’s not clear that those kinds of tests will encourage you to think critically, and give you the kind of deep understanding so that helps you to form your own opinions on controversial issues. It’s also not clear, though, that projects or essays or homework do that either. In general, writing essays will probably make you better at writing essays, and doing oral presentations will make you better at oral presentations. (oral presentations probably also are fantastic ways to promote memory), and those are valuable skills even if you don’t gain a deeper understanding of the material.” 

    Joseph-Nelson concluded by expressing an underlying desire to learn the material in the most effective way possible, whatever that may be. 

“I feel like the goal of a class should be to teach information in a meaningful way,” he said.

Written by: Sonora Slater — science@theaggie.org