A Biology Student, UBC

BIOL 260 - Fundamentals of Physiology  class average = 74 It was a good course. All I had to do were attend the lectures, understand all the concepts and the questions proposed in class. The instructors have passion in teaching and were very effective in demonstrating the course material. This course has 2 midterms and a final exam, but if you do better on the later exams, then they will omit the exams that you did poorly on - so you always have a chance to do better. I learned much about the introductory level understanding of ion transport mechanism and the action potential. The only bad thing about this course is that all the questions are written - my wrist would hurt after the first few questions :( BIOL 335 - Molecular Genetics   class average = 69 This course has two parts. The first half you learn about techniques and the later half you learn about developmental biology. The course is really interesting but it is really different from what you would expect from BIOL 234 -

BIOC 302 - General Biochemistry  class average = 71 This course deals with metabolism of Fat/lipids/ nucleic acids. Frankly speaking, I was reluctant to take this course. Apparently, this course was notorious for being one of the difficult courses offered at UBC. However, it turns out that I enjoyed it a lot. It is partly because other courses that I've been taking were not of my interest but also the whole metabolism pathway was pretty interesting and even applicable too! I think people who enjoye CHEM 233 (Organic Chemistry) or BIOL 201 (Intro Biochem) will love this course. It is true that the difficulty of the exams are quite high, but if you pace yourself well enough that you are able to solve the tutorial questions on your own beforehand, I think you are pretty much set. There is much stress due to how the mark is distributed (MT 50% + Final 50%), but you can always make up on the final exam! I've heard many people saying that the nucleic acid portion that Dr.Maurus is

CAPS 390 - Introduction to Microscopic Human Anatomy  class average = 80 I would highly recommend taking this course in the summer. Not only Dr.Alimohammadi tries his best to make the course interesting but the exams are pretty straightforward. You just have to write down everything he mentions during the lecture and memorize all the contents that are on the slides. If you put decent amount of time into studying, you will definitely be rewarded. Also this course helped me a lot in understanding the basic human physiology.

CHEM 205 - Physical Chemistry I personally don't like Physical Chemistry, especially the Thermodynamics part. At least for me, physical chemistry isn't as intuitive as other Chemistry courses. I really had difficult times trying to understand everything, but my tip is that you shouldn't. I wasted many hours reading textbooks and reading lecture notes, but honestly, if you are not a chem major, then knowing how to do the problem sets and quizzes will help you the most getting a decent mark. The midterm was easy, I think the avg was 87%. Final exam was a bit challenging, but I would say that the spectroscopy and kinetics part made the course more interesting towards the end. This course is divided into 3 portions - Thermodynamics, spectroscopy, and kinetics. CHEM 235 - Organic Chemistry Laboratory Because I struggled many hours in the first term with CHEM 211 labs, this lab was a joke. You learn about basic techniques like distillation, synthesis of organic chemicals,