silva rerum

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

Another term has come and gone at jolly UBC and I’m sur­prised to find that I’m still stand­ing. Time for another unce­re­mo­ni­ous, ad hoc course eval­u­ation – done, of course, before my exams so that I won’t be biased by how dif­fi­cult I found the courses.

ENGL 304 (Advanced Composition)
This one felt pretty touch and go for most of the way…the pro­fessor really knows her stuff (she should – she wrote the text­book after all) and there were def­in­itely some innov­at­ive teach­ing meth­ods. However, I never really felt like I ever got into the rhythm of things and when I did, it was short-​lived. I’d recom­mend any­one to take this course if they feel that their writ­ing is a bit on the weak side; this course should help you pol­ish up your com­pos­i­tion skills. However, the title of the course, “Advanced Composition” is a bit of a mis­nomer – most of the course is spent on per­suas­ive essays, not expository.

ANAT 390 (Introduction to Microscopic Human Anatomy)
This one’s def­in­itely a rite-​of-​passage for most and it’s reas­on­ably tough. Because it’s a sur­vey course, you cover a lot of ground very quickly, leav­ing stu­dents who haven’t taken advanced bio­logy scratch­ing their heads. If you are, how­ever, a bio­logy senior with a good num­ber of cell bio­logy courses under your belt, you really ought to be fine; it won’t be any­thing you can’t handle. It’s taught by a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent pro­fess­ors, each of whom is an expert in the mater­ial that s/​he teaches – this is great because you get instruct­ors who really are experts at what they are teach­ing but you never know the level of instruc­tion you’ll get. Some are great and some not so much.

BIOL 361 (Introduction to Physiology)
I can’t say I ever really wanted to take this course – I took it because it’s man­dat­ory for my pro­gram. Nevertheless, it was enjoy­able, largely due to the efforts of my two won­der­ful instruct­ors. The course mater­ial itself is access­ible and not too oner­ous; all eval­u­ations were open-​book so it was really a test of get­ting enough down on paper to show that you knew what you knew. The top­ics are, at times, dry but I guess I can see why the course is man­dat­ory for all bio­logy majors. Regular study should lead to suc­cess in this course quite easily.

BIOL 304 (Fundamentals of Ecology)
Co-​taught by two instruct­ors, this course was in its first run this year after being revamped from the pre­vi­ous BIOL 302/​303 pro­gram. Deceptively breezy in the begin­ning, many stu­dents learned the hard way that this course stressed crit­ical think­ing (for long-​answer prob­lems) as well as rote mem­or­iz­a­tion (for defin­i­tions) on the midterm exam­in­a­tion. The labs were fun if labour-​intensive; they were gen­er­ally mark-​boosters. I’m sure, with time, that this course will become more refined but all I can say is that the course was still a bit rough around the edges when I took it. It was, how­ever, inter­est­ing enough that I’m con­sid­er­ing tak­ing BIOL 306.

BIOL 300 (Biometrics)
Absolutely dread­ing this course, I walked in with the low­est expect­a­tions ever. I felt that I had been deceived – I thought that no math was required after first year if I wanted to do the Biology pro­gram! Nevertheless, the math involved is quite basic if labor­i­ous at times (ANOVA, any­one?) and the examples provided are com­pel­ling and inter­est­ing. I can see why this course is man­dat­ory for all bio­logy majors and I found, in spite of myself, that I enjoyed this course and saw how it would be rel­ev­ant to research. The eval­u­ation is straight­for­ward and fair, if com­pre­hens­ive. Regular study and prac­tice should serve you well.

BIOL 360 (Cell Physiology Laboratory)
This course was a blast from begin­ning to end! It’s struc­tured far more cas­u­ally than those formal chem­istry labs and you get to pick and choose among the exper­i­ments that interest you. There’s not a strong emphasis on the acquis­i­tion of labor­at­ory tech­niques, though, aside from cent­ri­fu­ga­tion and micropipet­ting, which was very dis­ap­point­ing. The TAs were help­ful and the dir­ector was always open for ques­tions, though. Marking is rig­or­ous and more dif­fi­cult than you might imagine.

BIOL 240 (Experimental Design in the Life Sciences)
This review might be moot see­ing as how this was the last year that BIOL 240 will be run­ning (for now) but I thought it was won­der­ful. It’s extremely time-​consuming, how­ever, and required much more atten­tion than I had pre­vi­ously ima­gined but what you put in is what you get out. I learned a lot of valu­able labor­at­ory tech­niques in here, as well as fig­ur­ing out that sci­entific research is not as romantic as I might have once ima­gined (I have so much pity for people who work with Neurospora crassa). Still, this course was just so reward­ing and so great! I took so many pic­tures and they’ll always have a cher­ished place in my heart.

Next term is almost cer­tainly going to be hugely dif­fer­ent; a huge influx of ENGL courses will shake up the bal­ance of things while BIOL 337 will either break me or make me. I’m excited!

Now, not to get ahead of myself, time to com­mence studying!