Students learn about themselves from the inside out

Editor’s Note: This is part of a series called UChicago Class Visits, spotlighting transformative classroom experiences and unique learning opportunities offered at UChicago.

Half a dozen University of Chicago students briskly pedaled on stationary bikes, but this wasn't a casual workout. The electrodes attached to them fed data back to their lab partners, who monitored how efficiently their peers' hearts pumped blood and oxygen to the rest of their bodies.

The experiment was part of a unique College course called “Metabolism and Exercise.” Taught by Mark Osadjan and Beatrice Fineschi, instructional professors within the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division, the Core sequence is split into two parts: the first focuses on how the human body works and its systems interact—and the second half takes students inside the lab to examine the impact of exercise and stress.

“We use exercise and fitness as a hook to teach them some really hard biology,” said Osadjan. “We get to dive into the details and show the students how the human body actually works.” 

“I don’t know if I would have taken a biology class without the Core, but it’s a great opportunity to choose a class like this,” said first-year math major Matthew Paraboschi. “I think that anatomy of the human body and how exercise impacts it is fascinating.”

Osadjan said the unique course allows students to learn about themselves.

“It’s all about giving students the tools to make decisions about health and their body themselves,” Osadjan said. “What do you do if you go to the gym and want to burn fat? Do you go fast and furious or slow and steady? This class gives them the tools to discover what works best for themselves personally.” 

Becoming one with science

In the first half of the course, students learned concepts like metabolic rate, or the amount of energy the body needs to sustain itself over time. In the first lab experiment, the students became the subjects—calculating their own baselines to use in experiments throughout the quarter.  

They wear masks that capture their exhaled breath, which is used to measure oxygen and carbon dioxide—and determine how much energy their bodies are using, along with fats and carbohydrates.

“What we are doing in the lab is basically putting the skills that the students learn in lecture to use,” said Alejandro Garza, a third-year majoring in biology and English, who also served as a teaching assistant in the lab. “The students typically want the results to match what their expectations are after learning about the topic in the classroom. Our goal here is to talk with students and walk them through why things did or did not match up to what happened during the experiment.”

With this information, students learn what their own bodies are telling them from the stress of exercise. 

“As an athlete, it’s really cool to see how the body reacts to different situations, like getting put under stress,” said Ajer Sher, a second-year economics and computer science major and member of the Maroons men’s tennis team. “How all of the body's mechanisms can come together to push through and facilitate growth is something I didn’t know coming into this course.”

At the end of the course, students design their own scientific experiment and test it using the techniques that they have learned throughout the quarter. Submissions have ranged from the effects of caffeine on athletic performance to nicotine’s impact on muscle contraction.

First-year Joaquin Parra’s group investigated the effect of water ingestion on heart rate and blood pressure, both during and after exercise.

“We hypothesized that if the subject consumes water during moderate-low exercise, then heart rate and blood pressure will be lower during activity and will return to baseline faster when compared to exercising without water intake,” Parra said. 

Parra said that although his group's hypothesis proved to be inconclusive, he learned a lot during the course. 

“I never thought I would deal with neuroscience at all,” Parra said. “However, I was fascinated by how important synapses are to nearly every function of our body. The complexity of performing a single muscle twitch is simply amazing.” 

Both Osadjan and Fineschi said students enjoy when they make discoveries about their own bodies.

“What they learn is amazing,” said Fineschi. “It all appears in front of their eyes simply by looking at something like how much oxygen they consume and the impact it has on them. It comes to life, and that’s what makes it beautiful.”

This class illustrates the uniqueness of the Core curriculum at UChicago—asking questions and thinking critically about how to approach problems from multiple perspectives.

“The Core curriculum is one of the reasons I chose UChicago, as I believe that an asset that makes a person excellent is the ability to appreciate and grasp different areas of knowledge,” said Parra. “This is definitely an experience I will always value.”