With increasing demands for universities to create graduates that are numerically and scientifically literate, it is important to determine effective ways to engage students so that they can acquire these literacies. Using an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that focused on scientific and mathematical literacy, I examined how contextualization influenced students' abilities to build connections between their learning and their lives. In their written reflections, students connected course concepts with their social lives, academic pursuits and global or societal issues without specific prompting. I suggest that contextualization combined with reflection allows students to illustrate their understanding and apply this knowledge to novel scenarios.