One of the great things about utmONE Scholars is the diversity of student perspectives that come together to learn and connect with each other. We've gathered the experiences of our past utmONE Scholars in the form of video and written stories. Please explore and find out what makes utmONE Scholars such a unique, thought-provoking, unparalleled learning experience in your first-year!
Scholars Stories
My favourite aspect of the course was being able to do a research project for a specific topic about which I was passionate, leading me to do a group project regarding ethnopharmacology. No other course has challenged me to take such initiative of critically analyzing scientific literature and papers, come up scientific approaches and questions, as well as recapitulate the complex information to be elucidated in a manner that anyone can understand.
When I look back at my experience as a utmONE Scholar, I see how the scholar’s course was able to provide me with a more intimate learning environment where I was able to break out of my shell a bit more. I was able to interact with my professors more one-on-one, get to know my peers better, all while improving skills such researching academic papers through the discussions and projects.
In this utmONE course, I realized how inclusive and open-minded my fellow peers were. Initially, we were uncomfortable with articulating our thoughts; but by the end of the course, we all shared our opinions and analysis of literature easily. The encouragement to participate in this course encouraged me to engage more in my other classes as well.
Every week we would read several, themed articles and then the professors would pose discussion questions. These discussions broadened my perspective of scholarly articles and made them seem less daunting, especially because as a first-year student I had very limited experience with academic literature.