Cell 200 with Paul LaPointe.
In hindsight, this is one of the most useful biomed classes to take. It teaches you the basics of many different things i.e. neurotransmission, signal transduction, organelle transport, lab techniques. With that said, I found this to be a hard course, as it requires you to both memorize minute details and be able to connect different concepts together. Personally, I didn't find Dr. Lapointe to have great explanations but the slides were comprehensive on their own and he didn't test anything he mentioned in class that wasn't on the slides. I made Anki flashcards after every class and did them every day. I studied approximately 4-5 hours a week for this course and about 20-30 additional hours for each midterm. Paper assignments were a little challenging so I'd recommend discussing it with a friend. Overall a good course, but don't sleep on the difficulty of the first midterm...it shook a lot of people up
AFNS 524 - NU FS 424 - ONCOL 424 - ONCOL 524 with Dr. Vera Mazurak, Dr. Vickie Baracos, Dr. Lisa Martin
The overall experience was good. It was a night class (3 hrs, 1 day/week) from 6-9pm. 6-7 pm was for doing asynchronous lectures (which always take longer than 1 hour), and 7-8:30pm was for group discussions about a paper assigned weekly. The workload was phenomenal. Each week, there are about 3-5 required background papers/textbook chapters, a paper and associated questions for discussion, and an asynchronous lecture component. I wish I knew about the workload before taking the class. However, the lecture material was interesting. M tip would be to allocate about an hour every day of the week to work on the asynchronous tasks because it is super easy to get behind.
MICRB 265 with Casey Fowler
Very interesting course material. Quite applicable to everyday life and informative! The prof, Casey Fowler, seems nice but creates horrible tests. The questions are super specific and most are irreverent (ie. The decade in which the first bacterial genome was sequenced). The final was a 100 question multiple choice test, and he said that any detail posted in the notes was fair game because everything he says is important. He would dismiss all criticism by mentioning he went to McGill as an undergrad and it was much harder, so we have no reason to be upset. Could just be the way the course is designed but it decreased my overall enthusiasm I had for the course at the beginning of the semester.
CELL 201 with Paul LaPointe
Cell 201 is a challenging course because not only is there a lot of memorization, you also have to understand the material. Paul LaPointe was a great professor though, and he explained the concepts very clearly and would be willing to meet with me to make sure that I was doing the best that I could in the course! Something I wish I knew before I took the course would be how to read research papers, since neither me nor anyone in my group really knew how to interpret the research papers we were given, so I would recommend taking this course with GENET 270 as either a pre- or co-requisite because in that course you learn how to read papers. I would recommend meeting with the prof frequently to make sure you understand the material, because if you do not understand the material you will not do well in the course.
CELL 300 with Dr. Paul Melancon and Dr. Tom Hobman
CELL 301 with Dr.Thomans Simmen and Dr. Rick Wozniack
I didn't really enjoy CELL301. The course is very paper-heavy and focused on a lot of specific experiments, and it was difficult for me to follow the holistic concepts they were trying to cover. I enjoyed Dr. Wozniack's section more than I enjoyed Dr. Simmen's section, because I found the material on the nucleus a lot more interesting than the material on the mitochondria. In terms of studying, there actually wasn't that much material to cover. Both exams were open-book, and it was much more important if you understood the material and knew how to apply it. In order to do well in this course, I would recommend that you practice reading and interpreting scientific papers.
CELL 398 with Dr. Paul LaPointe
The research courses are my favourite courses offered by the Cell Biology department! Unlike the traditional lecture courses which are exam-focused, you get an opportunity to explore a field of interest to you, and a nice break from studying. In terms of workload, all you have to do is perform your experiment (worth 70% of your final grade) and submit a written report (worth 30%) at the end of the term. A lot of the time you will have opportunities for oral or poster presentations (such as CBSA Research Day), which helps streamline the process of writing your final report. In terms of the lab component, you are not assessed on the quality of your data (unlike 499), but rather on how well you performed the techniques, how much you attempt to contribute to the trajectory of your project, and how eager you are to be in the lab. That being said, the course is a LOT of work!!! I spent about 10-20 hours per week in the lab, so pretty much whenever I wasn't in class I was doing lab work, so it does take away a fair bit from your study time so I would suggest to plan accordingly for that semester and maybe only take a partial course load or some easier electives in the same semester that you choose to take this course.
