Individually Advised Learning

"Individually Advised Curriculum" is a curriculum where the the student really feels like they're choosing their path. For example, at Grinnell, we have independent majors where you actually get to choose every course that you're going to take. It doesn't have to be focused in one department. You're really in charge of your learning and you get to take out of college whatever you want. I'm a Computer Science student, but I also take a lot of art classes. Each student in the class was allocated a lot of money for buying materials that they would then use. I was able to use the funding to buy a lot of plants because I make ecological art. So they're pretty generous about making sure students don't face a financial burden from these classes. And then the professors are also quite open and how that funding is used for the class. 100% of students will have the opportunity to pursue research experiences, whether that's in a classroom setting or outside of the classroom setting in something called a MAP and MAP stands for "Mentored Advanced Project." So I had the opportunity to do a MAP over the summer. So my interests are food and nutrition and community health and public health. I worked with rats all summer I was feeding them junk food and was looking at the effect of junk food and diet variety on motivation at the behavioral and physiological level. And at the end of it, we're going to produce a paper and a poster. And eventually, we're hoping to present our project at the Conference for Ingested Behavior in Portugal in July.