by Ellen Boldt ’26

As a Biology major, I pursued multiple laboratory science courses during my time abroad.  These were often my most challenging classes, due to the complexity of the vocabulary.  In the fall, I took a Vertebrate Biology course, which involved three-hour dissection labs every week, during which time I dissected a mouse, goldfish, and part of a preserved dogfish shark. The labs were supposed to teach us to focus on certain aspects of what we had learned in class.  We looked at organs in terms of an evolutionary continuum, except for the shark dissection, which focused on sensory exploration. 

In the fall semester (Vertebrates), there were about 40 students in the labs, overseen by one professor and about four teaching assistants.  This structure was a much larger class than I would have been used to in the US, and with less supervision and group work for the lab procedures than I expected as well.  The lab procedures were more broadly structured and less rigidly paced, as students were expected to follow a written procedure with minimal overview and help.  In my American lab experience, the final product of the lab on which we would be graded would be a written report with observations, or possibly showing our dissection work for an anatomy lab.  However, both my vertebrate class in the fall and my animal diversity class in the spring, which focused on invertebrates, required us to submit notated drawings and diagrams of the structures we were dissecting and observing, with minimal forehand guidance of what we were looking for: just a list of parts that we would need to label. 

These differences were challenging but provided a practical way for us to learn structures.  Making us try to find structures as we dissected, and then draw them as we found them, was a good way for us to show what we were learning, and to show that we had captured the context of the body parts we identified. 

In the spring semester (Animal Diversity), there was an even bigger class of at least sixty students in each lab group.  Rather than dissecting, we observed whole samples of arthropods and invertebrates preserved in alcohol.  This was easier in some ways than following a delicate dissection procedure, but labelling microscopic structures was its own challenge, as well as identifying the samples by species through use of a dichotomous key (in German!).  One assignment I struggled with particularly was when I tried to draw sections of bumblebee wings so I could label them.  On the other hand, I enjoyed making the drawings and occasionally received compliments on them, which helped to build my confidence.  While I was familiar enough with using dichotomous keys to be mostly effective, I draw the line at beetles.  The known beetle species comprise 25% of all known animal species—there are too many for an amateur to meaningfully differentiate with so blunt a tool as a dichotomous key! 

It was hard when we did field work at an outdoor nature preserve, because I didn’t have my computer with me for looking up words; I could sometimes identify an animal by its English name without knowing what it was called in German. 

One of the last Biology projects for my year in Bremen was a trip with my Animal Diversity class to the Übersee (Oversea) Museum, which is a sort of natural history museum.  A group of about 30 of us went into a back room and got to handle some of the artifacts that had been collected from around the world, including ancient wasps that had been preserved in amber.  My group made dichotomous keys to identify specimens of squid and octopi. I was amazed to learn that Germans don’t have differentiated commonly used words for squid, octopus, and cuttlefish:  they were all called by the same name in German, “Tintenfisch”! 

Conducting the labs in German provided an extra layer of challenge, but I am glad I was able to familiarize myself with a new category of German vocabulary.  I communicated with my lab partners in German but did find myself looking up quite a few words in my German-English dictionary.