A Biology Student, UBC

ENGL 110: I took this course to fulfill my English requirement. This course only deals with few poems, couple short stories and 1 novel so it is pretty chill. I do hear that taking this during the winter session increases the workload. In general, I want to encourage taking English courses in the summer.  Especially if you are a keen student aiming for Pharmacology/Physiology or Microbiology. I went to see advisors for both PCTH and PHYL and they both told me that admission average is based on the winter term marks - this means that you can maintain high GPA during your winter session and take notorious courses in the summer. I was doing pretty well in this course, but I screwed up on the final exam... This course together with ENGL 112 are the lowest marks I have....haha.. + If you are taking ENGL 110 course in the summer,never hesitate to take a science course at the same time as ENGL 110 doesn't need a lot of effort.

In 2nd year, I declared Microbiology and Immunology. I didn't really know what my interest was and I thought that Physiology sounded right. So even though I was in MBIM 2nd year, I was taking courses as if I was in a Physiology major. * Declaring for a major doesn't really mean anything. Some Specializations do start in the 2nd year (CHEM, BIOC, BIOL, MATH  etc) but for some of the majors like MBIM, PCTH (Pharmacology) or PHYL (Physiology), you are not guaranteed a seat yet. So you do have a chance to get in after 2nd year if you didn't make it in after 1st year. CHEM 211 : Analytical Chemistry The lecture portion of the course was interesting. You learn about statistics in Chemistry and many different type of titrations. I liked the EDTA titration part and solving the problem sets was fun but tough. However, since this course is a 4 credit course, it involves a lab. The lab portion of this course is a killer. It is totally different from the 1st year Chem labs; there

BIOL 112 : Biology of the Cell This course was notorious among the first years. Luckily, I had a good prof and I really enjoyed the course. His name was Dr. Taylor, I don't know if he still teaches this course, but he does put a lot of effort to make the course interesting. This course is like CHEM 121 where you are given a custom text so studying for this course wasn't too bad for me. I remember final exam being reasonable. There is one lecture on eukaryotic gene regulation and I remember that many of the questions on the final exam was related to that topic so watch out! CHEM 123 : Physical and Organic Chemistry This course is interesting in that it is a combination of Physical Chemistry and Organic Chemistry. This course, in retrospect, is a GPA booster. Having taken CHEM 205 (Physical Chem) and CHEM 233 (Organic Chem), I don't really know why I did so bad (relatively) on this course. My advice on this course is that you have to focus on doing the practice proble

These are the courses that I have taken in term 1 when I was just starting UBC BIOL 121 : Genetics, Evolution and Ecology This is an introductory course on Ecology, Genetics and Evolution. I really liked the Genetics portion of the course and that was pretty much it. Contents taught in Ecology and Evolution was just too plain and were very picky on the marks (exams were all written). This course really can be different based on which prof you get, so I highly recommend that you do some searchings beforehand. This is also the course that I spent the most time on, but it turns out that I didn't have to. It assigns you a lot of pre-readings but only 20% of the materials were examinable. All the readings took me whole Saturday and I regret doing all the readings when I was done with the course; in fact, you can probably do decent on this course just by studying the materials covered during the lectures. CHEM 121 : Structural Chemistry, with Application to Chemistry of the Elem