End of Term Wrap-Up

This is my End of Term Wrap Up for term 2 of Winter 2010 (following last term).

BIOL 201 – Biology 201 – Introduction to Biochemistry
Dr. Sunita Chowrira
Tuesday / Thursday
8:00 AM – 9:30 AM (TTh)

So BIOL 201 went better than expected. I picked up on much more material this year than I did last year (or at least, I managed to solidify a lot that wasn’t quite sitting with me last year). Although I wasn’t as quick at answering questions here as I was in BIOL 200 (hey, I’m a biology major, not biochemistry…), I was able to answer essentially all the questions thrown at me (although, some of them, such as the tutorial problems, took some time for me to work around). The worst part about BIOL 201 ended up being that there was much less in-class interaction compared to BIOL 200. But overall, it was a fun term

BIOL 335 – Biology 335 – Molecular Genetics
Dr. Hugh Brock / Dr. George Haughn
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (MWF)

I wasn’t actually enrolled in this course this term. I just decided to sit in it with some friends since I wanted to learn the material, I didn’t want to take any more courses this term, and it was in a big lecture hall with many empty seats. The professors for this course were both amazing. As for the material, it had its ups and downs. Several of the lectures I found incredibly interesting, but others I was left asking myself why I was still sitting in. Nonetheless, I’m happy with what I’m walking away with.

CPSC 445 – Computer Science 445 – Algorithms in Bioinformatics
Dr. Irmtraud Meyer
Tuesday / Thursday
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM (TTh)

So, I love biology, and I’m good at computer science. Who would have thought that merging the two (bioinformatics) would have an emergent property of suckage? Anyhow, I found this course unexpectedly boring, and it has concrete-ified the fact that I refuse to work in bioinformatics when I graduate…

The lectures were formatted such that Dr. Meyer copied the notes from last year onto the board… …and then posted the notes after the class was over. I don’t really know why I went to these lectures–I was stunned and tired every class, and for the final, I ended up teaching myself everything from the lecture notes anyways…

The assignments were okay at the beginning when everything was still novel. As time progressed, and the course got exponentially more boring (of course, it doesn’t hit me until after the drop-date…), assignments became more difficult to complete. Additionally, the assignments were often given with only one week’s notice to complete, and often happened to coincide with my travel dates (when I went to Combining Two Cultures in Hamilton, and then later NiRC and Ampersand in Montreal). Furthermore, I didn’t feel prepared for many of the assignments at all. I haven’t done an actual hard-core programming course since first year now, and two of these assignments required some pretty in depth programming. So I was getting pretty pissed off when my program was having mystery segmentation faults, and reading from memory slots its not supposed to be… …and beyond the programming issues, it also came up that we were supposed to know how to use (and multiply) matrices, but I’ve never taken MATH 221 (!!!) so I didn’t know how to do that assignment either. *sigh* And to top it all off, assignments in this course were worth 50%, so this course is potentially going to be a disaster…

CPSC 490 – Computer Science 490 – Student Directed Seminars (CS Education)
Elizabeth Patitsas / Dr. Steve Wolfman / Dr. Patrice Belleville / Dr. Allison Elliot Tew
Friday
3:00 PM – 4:00 PM (F)

This was an SDS that I was sitting in on. I didn’t actually attend the whole curriculum–I just attended a weekly journal club/discussion group that was attended by ~10 students and then variably Dr. Wolfman, Dr. Belleville, and Dr. Elliot Tew. Dr. Ken Yasuhara also had a guest appearance at one meeting. At these meetings, we discussed several papers each week, and the discussions often got quite interesting (although, occasionally they would be quite… …quiet). I really enjoyed hearing other opinions about education, especially from such an analytical group. The only downside was that the focus was on Computer Science–I (obviously) would have liked to have seen the conversation expanded to include other programs as well.

EOSC 448 – Earth and Ocean Sciences 448 – Directed Studies – DIRECTED STUDIES
Dr. Danielle Winget / Dr. Curtis Suttle

So my Directed Studies this year was an experience (I’ll be continuing it this summer during co-op). I have concluded I hate part time lab work. There’s not enough time in a week to get anything done in the lab working part time (part of the reason being the specifications of a Directed Studies). After doing my NSERC last year, losing 75% of my time spent in the lab was incredibly annoying. I’m looking forward to returning to full time work this summer…

EOSC 475 – Earth and Ocean Sciences 475 – Marine Microbiology
Dr. Curtis Suttle
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

The best part about this course is that it was relevant to what I am learning in my lab. The worst part is that it was largely focused on bacteria (*shudder*) instead of viruses. Honestly, I was expecting there to be a much bigger focus on the viruses, but this course did cover a lot, especially since it was catering to microbiology, biology, and oceanography students…

The lectures used slides with essentially diagrams and no words, which was annoying for me because I can’t listen and write at the same time. The good thing was that a lot of the material was presented in a common sense format, so I didn’t end up writing much down. With respect to projects, the major assignment of this course was a critical analysis of a paper which was presented in a Wiki form (novel, eh?).

So overall, this course was good. There wasn’t much I really disliked about it (besides the midterm having vocabulary on it that we never really ended up using much later…), though I still wish more virus material was covered. Not to be picky and biased at all ;D

ISCI 300 – Integrated Sciences 300 – Interdisciplinary Seminar
Dr. Rik Blok
Tuesday
12:30 PM – 2:00 PM (T)

I was enrolled in this class, but as I passed it sometime at the beginning of the year, it was essentially like I was sitting in this one too. This course was quite fun, though I wish it was longer since often discussions started but there wasn’t much time to finish them. And because it has no set curriculum, a wide variety of interesting topics could be covered.

ISCI 320 – Integrated Sciences 320 – Research Development Project
Dr. Rik Blok / Dr. George Spiegelman / Dr. Jim Evans

I just finished this course yesterday. It was a unique course in that it was a one-week long 3 credit course starting after exams finish. For this course, we went up to a lodge in Pemberton for a week (with horrible internet and cell service) and worked on developing a research proposal for some scientific mystery decided upon by one’s assigned group. I knew everyone in my group (AR, JH, NV), so it worked out well. Our group was thinking about doing many different topics such as organism size, environmental microbiology, and effects of stress. However, the topic we ended up choosing was homosexuality (more specifically, how it is maintained in a population since homosexuals generally don’t pass on their genes to future generations; we were initially going to investigate this alongside why homosexuality is seen in so many species, but in having to narrow down onto own question, we ended up going with the how question). Other groups chose topics including hermaphrodites (why do we have gender?), love (is there a benefit to monogamy over polygamy?), spatial memory (is there a benefit to having memory of a location as opposed to simply rediscovering the environment each time?), the critical period (when is the critical period (the period when certain skills such as perfect pitch can be acquired) and why does it exist (why don’t organisms limit themselves to a period on when they can learn)?), and longevity (why do organisms die?). Although there were a lot of biology (read: sexual) topics at the camp, there was a diverse set of backgrounds and approaches to answering the questions ranging from observational work, to molecular work, to mathematical modeling.

On the intensity, official work times were generally 9am until after 7pm (with no set late limit). My group tended to go until 11pm ish, with the others working later, and me starting before 9am (I think I was the only real morning person at the camp…). Over the course of the week, we handed in 3 papers (each one increasing in length until the third paper, which was 12 pages long (and the issue was more of cutting stuff out to make everything fit as opposed to finding things to fill up the space)) and gave 2 presentations (one of which had an entertainment aspect to it, and I ended up “singing” with my group in front of everyone at the camp). So it was a very intense workload. Generally I would go to bed at midnight, wake up at 2am ish when my roommates (KC and PC) came to bed and then be out of bed around 6am or 6:30am. Thus, I was pretty sleep deprived on the trip (because I was getting only a few hours of sleep each night when I usually try to get 8 hours).

A few things I didn’t like about the course (obviously, some people were waiting for this)… I think the intensity was too high and the duration too short. The purpose of the camp was to get students thinking about how to go about writing a research proposal and critically analyzing one’s own work. The intensity was constantly high, and as a result, I (along with many others) were deprived of sleep. Generally, sleep deprivation has negative effects on thinking, and thus I think the intensity was too high. Another aspect of the camp was to get feedback and collaborate with other groups. However, besides the first few nights where we actually had a couple of hours between work and bed (yay Mafia!), there wasn’t much time to discuss with other groups (I wanted to spend quite a bit more time speaking with the other groups and reading their proposals, but there wasn’t enough time at all ). Thus, I think the duration should be longer. The only other real complaint I have is that the instructors and TAs (AD and MM) weren’t always clear in their directions. I know that they were purposely trying to be vague and not lead us in a direction we wouldn’t have traversed on our own, but there was so much miscommunication between them and the groups (or at least, ours), followed by miscommunication within the group. By the end of the trip, I heard many things about groups conflicted over the advice of the higher ups being interpreted differently between the group members (and also how to address that advice). I don’t know how to tackle this, since I understand the importance of being vague, but taking our group for instance, we started over at least once per day. If we had better understood the advice, we could have much better spent that time improving what we did keep in our project.

However, overall, I really did enjoy this course. It was great spending time with everyone at the lodge, and I ended up learning quite a bit about the overall process (especially (emphasizing my existing knowledge of) how difficult it is to critically analyze one’s own work…). Although I’m glad that I’m back to getting actual sleep, I do miss everyone at the lodge

ISCI 433 – Integrated Sciences 433 – Ethical Issues in Science
Dr. Rana Ahmad
Tuesday / Thursday
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM (TTh)

This was my favourite course this term (at least, for courses between January and April). It was my first exposure to ethics, and I thought it was quite a fun course. Our professor chose interesting examples and allowed for quite a bit of discussion during the lectures, so it was a very interactive class. The only downsides of this class were that it targeted breadth but little depth (though, we didn’t exactly have much time to do with without sacrificing the other), that she seemed to like both my writing style and my ideas but not when they were integrated together, and that exams had a short answer section that was purely memorization from the readings (which there were bloody many of, I might add; I don’t understand how Arts students survive…). But despite these things, ethics remains my favourite course this term.

MICB 325 – Microbiology 325 – Microbial Genetics
Dr. Tom Beatty / Dr. Steve Hallam
Monday / Wednesday / Friday
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM (MWF)

This is a microbiology course, but I’m actually going to praise it (for the most part). For the first time ever, I have taken a microbiology course that focuses on thinking instead of memorization (thank you Dr. Beatty!)!!! I will have to admit, though, that the course progressed unbelievably slowly. We essentially went over an experiment that would’ve taken a normal course a single class, broken down into smaller bits of the course of the term. He did this so that students would understand what was happening at each stage of the experiment (which appears to be useful for most people… …many people were having problems understanding it as we went along… …though, to be fair, it isn’t something usually thrown at M&I students…). I will admit, it was incredibly slow and I ended up not paying attention in class (hooray for logic saving me during exams), but at least the examination approach I found to be better than the typical M&I. Anyhow, Dr. Beatty’s section I found to be quite well executed in terms of switching to a thinking (as opposed to the stereotypical/traditional biological method of pure memorization) method of education. Dr. Hallam’s section I found to be more interesting content wise, but it seemed to go more on the “Here are an assortment of random facts” style, which contrasted to Beatty’s thinking method presented earlier in the term. Hallam only had one question of the final exam (which was thankfully not supposed to be a memorization question) which was given to us before the final exam. Unfortunately, he went over the answer with us during his last class (WTF?) so I have a feeling most people just memorized what he did in class and presented that as their answer (so a good thinking question got reduced to a memorization question in the end. Hooray.).

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