This post is about an esteemed course that I completed during the summer vacations. The course is offered on a website called Edx, which is an initiative taken up by Harvard, MIT, and several other universities.
As school vacations start and COVID doesn’t allow us to travel, we students must make the most of this precious time and be effectively engaged in experiential activities during the summer holidays. This can add value to your personal statement and for your college applications.
The course I have completed is called Science with cooking. It is all about the different scientific (Chemistry) aspects in the most basic activity in our lives, cooking. These are the kinds of courses that make us realize that that science is all around us and it isn’t just a theoretical subject just to learn in school.
Participating in this course has given me immense interest in courses that are applicable to real life. As I started looking for courses to do, I thought they were all theory and subject based, however, taking part in this course has opened my eye to another whole world of opportunity where the theory can be applied in real life.
I have further gained priceless knowledge that I hadn’t heard of before. There were several instances of new learnings such as the concept behind protein strand in food, or how the moles present in different items affect factors in your food, also heat diffusion equations that help you estimate cooking time. These pieces of knowledge are valuable and have helped me understand more about the advanced chemistry that goes through when chefs create signature dishes. It has shown me that cooking is not just a chore, it requires precision, skill and experimenting to make the best dish possible.
The course was made of 6 modules that gave us theoretical knowledge first including practice questions. Then we got to apply our new learnings in our own kitchen through simple experiments, then you had to record your observations, and these were graded. Further, there were homework sections where your answers to questions based on the module’s theme would also be graded.
The best part, however, was learning several recipes from chefs around the world and being able to make them at home and enjoy it.
At the end of the course, if you get a passing grade you will receive a certificate of completion. The passing grade is 60%, and I achieved 99% in this course. The certificate and score graph is attached.
In the future, I look forward to doing my second course based on the introduction to CS50 (Computer Science).
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