1st Year Term 2 2011 Review

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 problems for PChem but you also have to focus on the concepts for Ochem. I remember that I was often frustrated because thermodynamics didn't make sense to me and I put much time into studying Pchem portion while the Organic Chemistry portion can't be neglected. Again, in retrospect, the materials covered in this course is superficial and I really hope you do well in this course :)

MATH 103:
Integral Calculus with Application to Life Science
This course wasn't so bad having taken AP Calculus in high school (I really recommend doing AP courses in high school!! It will give you a great advantage in 1st year). The labs get easier once you get used to it. The lecture was dry but I liked it overall. I do recommend taking Math 105 though because apparently they changed the curriculum so they cover more topics (even some 200 level stuff I heard). Apparently not many people do well on the exams for 105 and there is huge scaling at the end. So, it is really your decision but if I was to re-take it, I would go for Math 105. Having taken both MATH 102 and 103, it does cover some of the Life Science equations and how they were derived, I think I was expecting too much when they said "Life Sciences" :P

PHYS 101:

Energy and Waves

To start off, people tend to do well in 1st year physics courses. It was a little bit intimidating to take it because I had so much trouble with Physics 12, it turned out to be interesting. First two topics cover fluid and simple harmonic motion; they aren't too difficult to understand, but when it comes to waves  and interferences...hmm... well, good luck. I really recommend that you take this course with Iqbal, apparently for his section, there are more than 50 students getting A+. When I found this out, It convinced me yet again that profs do matter in university unlike high school.

BIOL 140:

Laboratory Investigations in Life Science

 Despite my effort of spending all my weekend on this, I barely passed the average. It is really hard to get a good mark in this course; it is one of the courses where hard work doesn't really pay off. Even though this course is only worth 2 credits, it took most of my time in term 2. I would advice you to spend your time wisely. Never spend too much time on this course as most of the students end up in a B range. Just put an ample amount of effort and move on to do other workload you have instead.

Overall comment:
I didn't do so great in term 2 compared to term 1 and this is really the moment I regret.
I learned that these moments will never come back to you but will stay forever with you on the transcript. So.. it may be frustrating to study for finals and everything, but pleaseee do spend time and effort, it will be worth it !! 

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