Syllabus

Introduction to the Professions
Department of Biological, Chemical, and Physical Sciences
fall 2003

Instructor: Andrew Howard

IIT office: Life Sciences Room 174
IIT phone: 312-567-5881; fax 312-567-3576; pager 630-905-0534
APS phone: 630-252-0534; fax 630-252-0521
howard@iit.edu

Course Website: http://csrri.iit.edu/~howard/itp/
Course Textbook: James Trefil, 101 things you don't know about science and no one else does either. This book consists of 101 two-to-four-page essays about specific topics in science. The first ten are essential, and I expect everyone to read them in the first few days of class. We will have two writing assignments associated with those first ten essays. The others will serve as points of discussion during the semester. By the end of the semester you will have read the whole book, and I think you'll be glad you had done so.

Department Advisors:

Part of the purpose of this course is to acquaint you with resources available at IIT. One of the resources of which you should avail yourself is your academic advisor within the department. Those advisors are:

Course Goals:

Class Hours

Section Number Day Time Location
001 Tuesday 1350-1530 Life Sciences 157
002 Thursday 1000-1115 Life Sciences 157

Office Hours

Tuesday and Thursday: 1125-1300 and 1530-1700 in Life Sciences 174.
Others by appointment (see phone numbers and e-mail addresses)
Note that if you wish to page me, you need to dial the pager number, wait for the beep, and then punch in the ten-digit number you're calling from. I sometimes get four- or five-digit pages, and I don't know how to answer them. Even a seven-digit page is a little ambigiuous, since I don't necessarily know whether you're paging me from within the 312 area code or from elsewhere.

Turning in assignments:

You can turn most assignments in in hard-copy, as text e-mail, or as attachments to e-mail. The advantage of e-mail is that you don't have to have a working printer in order to send it. If you don't have a computer yourself, you can use the machines at Galvin Library. There's probably only one assignments for which you might find it easier to write your answers in longhand: the assignment due on 22 October. Even there it's pretty easy to do it as a table in a spreadsheet, an HTML table, or even a table in a high-end word processing program like Microsoft Word.

Help with computing:

Based on the preparedness of students in the previous four years of entering BCPS students, I predict that many of you will already be pretty facile at using word-processing programs and at browsing the World Wide Web. Some of you, by contrast, may not have experience with spreadsheets or with actual programming. Some of your other professors or lab assistants in lab courses may indicate that they expect you to be able use a spreadsheet like Excel, and you may find it useful to program things yourselves, either for your coursework or for some other application. I will offer to provide a special session (outside of the scheduled class hours) to provide help with Excel as a general-purpose scientific data-entry and data-analysis tool. There are also resources elswehere within the university from which help with software can be obtained. However: We will be working through some computer activities as part of the laboratory segment of the course (see below).

Grading Plan:

Grade based on:

Policies:

Writing:

Writing is important to this course. I will be grading your written work for content, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and spelling. In addition, we will be assisted in the course by an Undergraduate Writing Assistant, to be chosen soon. He or she will assist in reading over your papers and will work directly with you on style and content. Sometime during the semester we hope that he or she will provide you with some general advice on writing and how to use your writing skills effectively at IIT. We're still working on the details of how our undergraduate writing assistant or assistants will interact with you; stay tuned.

Book List:

Everyone in the class needs to have read at least one of these books. A brief (less than 1500-word) commentary or review of one of these books is one of the options for the special project for the course, but even if you choose one of the other options for the special project, I expect you to have read one of the books. I have copies of most of them available for you to borrow, but you are also welcome to buy or borrow them. Most are in print and readily available. The list will be provided next week. You may also use a book of your own choosing, provided that you clear it well in advance with me. What I'm looking for are books that illustrate the interface between science and society and between one scientific discipline and another.