Part 11: The year of COVID-19

Module 11: Speciation // Alternative Blog Post

This year, I have had the honor of doing several things. I was accepted into the UMKC STAHR program in 2020, fortunately, it was not canceled. The program was virtual so by the time school started I was very familiar with zoom! Then, I become a year-long UMKC STHAR Ambassador. The program provided professional development and medical education. At K-State, I am a Class 2020 Snyder Fellow. This program helped gain professional development with a huge emphasis on leadership. I learned the importance of community and how it helps EVERYONE be successful. I was able to apply this knowledge in a couple of ways. First, I worked with leadership at K-State to assess the sense of community felt among minority pre-health (pre-med, pre-pa, pre-nursing. etc) students in both their pre-health club and advising. Second, I became part of the Intercultural Leadership Council, a joint council between the Department of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs and the Student Government Association to address problems or concerns of our substituents. I represented the Multicultural Student Affairs and worked toward addressing climate issues on campus. Lastly, this year I was accepted to the MCAT Immersion Program 2021 Quinnipiac University Frank H. Netter School of Medicine. I originally applied last summer but it was canceled so they considered my application this year!!

When I was sixteen, I began to care for my little sister after my mom passed away. Last fall, she had a sports injury where she tore her meniscus (and two other ligaments) in such a way that many orthopedic surgeons don't often see. She had to have surgery five hours away from home. I ended up going back home and took great care of her for three weeks. I underestimated her recovery and needed to help her around the clock. This led my grades to slip drastically for every class. Although it took the rest of the semester, I was able to catch up on my missing assignments.

This year taught me many lessons more than any other year as I have been working on my personal development for the last three years. More than anything, I learned the value of health. Every day I have been working to learning more about nutrition and to better take care of my body. Another valuable lesson that I have learned was that education has been part of my life for so long that it has been hard to break bad habits. For the next year, I plan to focus more on my academic growth.

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Introduction

My name is Carmen Del Real, I am from the Old Wild West (Dodge City, Kansas). Although I'm a Kansan, I've lived in California and often travel to Mexico. My friends and I on Highway 50, when we went Pokemon hunting. I am passionate about education and healthcare. I currently work as a Certified Surgical Technologist and volunteer at the Flint Hills Community Center as a Medical Interpreter. What fascinates me about biology is definitely physiology! I learned to really appreciate evolution. I often think about how the tools that we use and how the food that we consume affects humans and if our bodies will eventually be able to adapt. For example, highly processed food is known to be a contributor to diseases such as diabetes. Will our bodies adapt to did or is this something that can eliminate the humans or shall I say Homo sapiens. During this semester, hope to learn how evolution is currently changing ...

Part 10: Sexual Dimorphism in Female Pipefish

Module 10: Sexual Selection How is it possible for female pipefish ( Microphis deocata ) to court a male pipefish when is often the opposite? Figure 1: Female pipefish ( Microphis deocata ) [1] In class we learned that sexual selection explains sex differences so this evolutionary force must act differently in each sex. Often males tend to court a female because typically females are able to be choosy when selecting their mates. My hypothesis: Sexual Dimorphism in female pipefish demonstrates that low variation in fitness and weak sexual selection is found in males leading to female pipefish to compete by advertising for mates as they now get chosen due to intersexual selection. In the family of Syngnathidae, including pipefishes, have male pregnancy. This predisposes males to limit female reproductive success leading sexual selection to act more strongly on females with leads to female-female competition and male choice (reversed sex role) in pipefish...

Evolutionary Fitness: How to Measure It

Natural Selection is a process of sorting by the reproductive success that occurs in populations of replicating units. Where units can be defined as molecules, cells, organisms, or larger units. There are four conditions for natural selection to occur: (1) the units expressing the trait must vary in their reproductive success; (2) the trait must vary among the units in the population; (3) the correlation between the trait and reproductive success must be nonzero (i.e. positive correlation with reproductive success will yield an increase in frequency and vice versa); and lastly (4) the trait must be heritable. Fitness is a measure of relative reproductive performance that can be used to predict long-term dynamics. In other words, fitness is an organism's ability to survive and reproduce to contribute genetically to the next generation. Heritable traits that have greater fitness will increase in a population subject to natural selectio...

Evolution Class Experience

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