EFTA00472328.pdf

From: MARK TRAMO < To: "Stephanie A. White" ', "Fink, Robert" Cc: "Smith, Judi" , "Miller, Gre , Barney Schllin er Neal Stulberg "Maria, Belen" , "Neuman, Dan" Bee: ' 'd Subject: To Professors White and Fink re: Music Mind & Brain (MusInd103/NeurosciM170) Spring 2018 Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2018 17:08:02 +0000 Dear Stephanie & Bob, What a turnout last night for the first Music Mind & Brain seminar! Thank you for informing your students, accrediting it for the Neurosci and Music majors/minors, and, of course, supporting its 9th year here at UCLA (and 21st overall since its inception at Harvard College of Arts & Sciences in the Mind Brain & Behavior Interfaculty Initiative). The Registrar, perhaps mistakenly, enrolled 35 students in the class: 25 slots reserved for NSci students plus 10 reserved for Music students. Another 10-15 showed up asking for inclusion, many of them senior Neurosci, Music or Psychol students (the course also counts towards the CogSci and Psychobiol major/minor). Since the horse was already out of the barn re: keeping enrollment in the past seminar range of 20-25, I asked the 35 students who were already officially enrolled to vote on whether to keep the class at 35 or go to 45-50. They overwhelmingly voted to include everyone. The only downsides I foresee are: 1) obtaining and sending PTEs to all the students not among the first 35; 2) increasing the size of student study sections for each seminar to 6-7 instead of 3-4 and divvying up oral presentations of professional journal publications such that two students will share a presentation in some cases; and 3) still assigning but no longer correcting/scoring homework questions that highlight the key points of each seminar. The latter will still be documented and posted with answers on the course website by that seminar's 3 scribes, with whom I meet after class. (The final exam includes many of those questions and some others.) In a sense, the snafu of enrolling 35 students appears to have defaulted into a "transitional" year marking the end of our one-quarter seminar and, hopefully, the start of next year's two-quarter lecture course with 2-3 sections per week. However, for Music majors/minors, we might want to consider keeping the Spring seminar as originally envisioned by Professors Neuman and Rice so we can tailor it to their interests, educational backgrounds, and music expertise, which are naturally quite different from those of the Neurosci and Psychol students who will likely make up the vast majority of students enrolled in the two-quarter lecture course. Yours, Mark Mark Jude Tramo, MD PhD Dept of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA Dept of Musicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Director, The Institute for Music & Brain Science Co-Director, University of California Multi-Campus Music Research Initiative (UC MERCI) http://www.BrainMusic.org http://merci.ucsd.edu EFTA00472328