1. With regard to your chosen seminar topic, what drew you to that particular topic? In choosing this topic, which of your previously taken courses do you anticipate will be most helpful to you in completing your seminar project.

 

For my seminar topic, I was drawn to this topic specifically because of a recent family member of mine being diagnosed with Body dysmorphia. It was quite a shock for me to have never really heard of someone being officially diagnosed with this disorder. I felt as though being able to dive into the disorder and to breach what exactly causes it could help me better approach conversation. Along with this I am also very interested in mental disorders and how society reacts/handles different ones. It is very evident that as a society we have begun to normalize mental illnesses but it stops on certain ones. Disorders like Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, or OCD have a sort of social stigma around them that is different from Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Major Depressive disorder. In the biology realm it is almost similar, there is considerable more research done on more common disorders rather than Body dysmorphia or Bipolar disorder. Previously I have taken two psychology courses as well as genetics. All three of these courses have really briefed me on the topic I ended up choosing. 

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1. What is your assessment of your writing ability at this point? Do you feel well prepared for developing a term paper and oral presentation?

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I feel like my writing ability at this point is good. I will always be open to learning more and furthering my knowledge when writing research papers. In the past I have done multiple research projects so the aspect of writing one is not daunting to me. This topic, however, puts a small amount of doubt on my ability because it is not as broad as I was hoping. BDD is very under-tested therefore there is a lack of varied research papers to reference when writing. Once I have enough information on my sources and I have formatted my paper I am positive the writing will come smoothly. As for the oral presentation, that portion of this seminar course makes me slightly nervous. I have only given one oral presentation virtually and it was a group paper, so my part was only five slides instead of twenty.