Justine Lazatin, SUNY Geneseo, COPLAC David J. Prior Award Essay Submission Biology Major, Dance Minor Expected Graduation Date: May 2015 Email Address: Jcl9@geneseo.edu Cell Phone Number: 7168680377 Between Many Worlds I am a scientist. I take great pride in my research on the parasite that causes “African Sleeping Sickness.” I want to be a doctor. My vision is to live in a suburban area earning a decent paycheck. But I am also a dancer. My parents enrolled me in my first dance class at the age of four. Today I am a choreographer for my college dance ensemble. Even though the sciences and the arts have always represented significant parts of my life, I tried to separate my life as a scientist from that as an artist. Having been born in the Philippines, but growing up in America, I was caught in between my Filipina biology and American culture. I was also caught between my life as a scientist and an artist. I live between many worlds. The goal of my undergraduate education was to facilitate acceptance to medical school. To achieve this, I entered college as a Biology major. I “dissected” my artistic life from my life as a scientist. My professors taught me to separate the world, the body, and the cell into smaller parts to study them. I took apart the various aspects of my own life to focus my studies on my science classes and research on parasitic disease. From the Greek word “parasitos,” “para” translates to “alongside” and “sitos” means food. Dancing acted as a parasite that came alongside 1 my studies in the sciences but returned no obvious benefits. The tool of scientific reasoning facilitated a division between my life as an artist and my life as a Biologist. It was not until my first Humanities course that I began to confront this great divide between my scientific and artistic life. While my courses in the sciences taught me to dissect the world around me to better understand it, my humanities course taught me that synthesis is the key to developing a full understanding of my world around me. Pythagoras viewed all things as whole and connected as numbers. He saw “numbers in time” as music, bridging the connection between Science, Arithmetic, and the Arts. Pythagoras encouraged each of us to find that piece inside ourselves that facilitates this connection to wholeness. The notion of wholeness and connection is important to reexamine in today’s careeroriented education system. I was expected to choose a major during my freshman year of college, which would not only dictate my subjects of study for the next four years but would eventually dictate my profession. In an education system that stresses specialization, my liberal arts education has challenged me to discover what it is in life that allows me to contribute to the whole, as well as live a more holistic life. In this search for wholeness, Plato’s Republic challenges us to act as “real stargazers.” Plato uses the metaphor of a stargazing captain navigating through shifting waters to demonstrate the need for the synthesis of the abstract and the observable. Through uncertainty and darkness, stars illuminate the way by providing the captain with a clear path. Plato urges each of us to utilize the stars as a tool to understand how we are connected to the entire universe. I act as 2 Plato’s “stargazer” when I turn to my liberal arts education to explore uncharted territory regarding the questions of global injustice and inequality. My liberal arts education is the tool that enlightens me time and time again in the face of darkness and uncertainty, providing a guiding path. I experienced art as a tool for synthesis and enlightenment while on a service learning trip in Nicaragua. We stayed the night in a mountainside community, Ocotál, where most families made their living off of farming shade coffee. There was a Spanish to English language barrier and a historical barrier produced by the Sandanista Revolution. There was a long list of all that separated us. When it got dark, a bonfire was lit and we all sat in a circle – Americans and Nicaraguans. My newest Nicaraguan friend, Enrique, and the professor leading the trip, Glenn, played their guitars and sang around the campfire to both American and Nicaraguan music. In the Republic , Plato explains that harmony of the soul can be experienced through music. Our perceived differences in language, history, and culture were still there, but the notes of the guitars and the harmony in the voices helped me to discover a harmony of the soul that I had never experienced before in my college career. Just as the music served as the vehicle to integrate people of different languages, cultures, and socioeconomic statuses, my liberal arts education has taught me to integrate the distinct aspects of my college experience for a more holistic and powerful understanding of the seemingly unjust world we live in. While I live a comfortable suburban life in the United States, I have experienced the extreme poverty that lies right outside our national borders. My great grandparents were rice 3 farmers in the Philippines, yet here I am graduating from a college in America with the hopes of pursuing a professional career. I often question: why do I deserve the firstworld opportunities and luxuries of America over children in developing nations? Integration between academic disciplines and across different cultures is central to the mission of a liberal arts education. This notion of integration, however, is not just a separate intellectual exercise that allows me to live my comfortable, yet disconnected life in the United States. While I started my premedical school education anticipating a life of privilege, my liberal arts education has freed me from my life of selfishness and converted me to my life of service. Confronting the issue of global injustice once more, I am planning a trip to Ghana to carry out research on a neglected African disease. An exemplary model for the concept of interdisciplinary culture, Ghana is a nation that has both the potential for significant innovation in science and emphasizes culture through music and dance. However, Ghana is also a nation that greatly depends on service since many villages are afflicted with various parasitic diseases. While I had entered my college career and traveled to Nicaragua without a sense of the power of integration across the sciences, the arts, great literature, and service, when I travel to Ghana I will be entering with a new set of eyes. I now understand how my artistic talent of creative thinking can help me to determine outofthebox solutions regarding my research on parasitic disease. My study abroad trip to Nicaragua has taught me that the pervasiveness of global inequality does not give me an excuse to ignore it. Rather, when confronted with issues of inequality and justice the texts of Pythagoras and Plato remind me of my roots and my personal connection to developing nations. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that, “Intelligence plus character…is the 4 goal of true education.” Paraphrasing MLK, I believe that intelligence plus character is the goal of a liberal arts education. 5