What to expect:
This course helped me appreciate the biology of our body! My instructor, Vivienne, made the course engaging and taught the content in a fun and effective way. She also let us stamp and draw all over her zoom slides. Despite the course being all online, Vivienne made sure that we had many chances to engage with herself and the other students. Also, the course content is super interesting and helped me reinforce concepts I learned in MICB 202.
There were lots of practice questions, but no answers. We had to ask on Piazza for other classmates to review our answers. There was also a tutorial component, and we went over practice questions and got help for our assignment.
Our assignment was to read a paper assigned to us based on our tutorial TA and we had to write a report on it. I didn’t do that well and I was really confused with all the words.
Exams are long answers based on data such as microscope images and experiments like DNA electrophoresis and SDS-PAGE.
Overall thoughts:
A good instructor can go a long way making a course fun and interesting. I wasn’t really looking forward to this course but my instructor made this course I looked forward to taking. Other then that, I was only taking this course because I thought I wanted to do a combined major in CS and Microbiology and Immunology. Otherwise, I would have not taken this course out of pure interest. It was basically an extension of BIOL 112. I did like the short discussion on learning about the types of drugs that could stop some cellular functions.