Part 2: The Learning (William)

Second year, 4 subjects, all science

WHAT WAS I THINKING!!!!

Okay so here is what I thought of each subject, note others do not agree, its all about a matter of taste really 😀

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology –

So with my rather rubbish marks in chemistry 1 & 2 from last year I thought this would be a struggle, I also thought that it would be more like metabolism and stuff specific, I was totally wrong, I thought it was a good subject…. So an eager beaver like myself was ready to fall asleep in the first lecture of this subject, but alas we started off learning all about DNA with the crazy Russian – Irene Stanley, I thought that she was totally cool and what she taught was actually really interesting and well organised and such, I actually really enjoyed the DNA stuff, really interesting, even though she got through slides rather slow. Next we were learning about proteins from some guy…. cant really remember his name, but he seemed kind of grumpy most of the time, but still he was good, as are all the lecturers, anyway, then there were enzymes, and the process of translation and metabolism, not really important to the story…. But anyway this was quite a good little subject, to be honest I was only doing it to do pathology next semester (Totally looking forward too!), so I didnt really care much about it, but I could see how people could like it….. The problem with it was it required constant work to memorize everything….. yeah about that…… I will leave that till later.

Fundamentals of Cell Biology –

Now this subject I could have seen as good…. If I could have bloody gone to the lectures!!!!!!!! So frustrating doing them online because there was a lot of stuff that you couldnt really understand unless you were there because it just wasnt apparent from the slides and the internet…. But yeah I managed to get through it, sort of…. more on that later…. But if you want to know about all the components of a eukaryotic cell! TOTALLY OF YOU!!! It was interesting and I quite enjoyed it, but it made me realize…. we call a lot of stuff in cells really stupid names, that are ridiculous to remember, especially in longish mechanism pathways like you had to know in this 😛 But really good.

Principles of Microbiology & Immunology –

I LOVED THIS SUBJECT!!!!! I just loved everything about it…. So it was all about bacteria and viruses, it was amazing, it was just so interesting learning about how something so small and insignificant can actually invade your body and cause so much damage… and just how important they are to the world…. I am going to do it as a major…. BUT BE WARNED!!! It is the most information dense thing I have ever seen, In summaries of the semester I wrote 30’000 words and attempted to learn it off by heart, It was so difficult… But anyway I loved this, but a lot of other people though that it was dry, but I guess I liked it because I am a tad weird, and bacteria are a tad weird haha…… But If you want to learn so many bacterial mechanisms then this is totally for you!!!!!

Experimental Microbiology –

Totally one of the most fun, but time consuming subjects I have done :D…. It took everything from the theory subject and let us do interesting things, such as culturing a fecal sample and then looking at the bad stuff in it.. but it was so much fun, I loved all the pretty shapes you got to look at under a microscope (of course there was actually science behind it and stuff, but its so much more fun to sell to people like that)… but yeah weekly 3 hour pracs and one or two prac reports due a week was time consuming, each report took me about 3 hours because you had to do exterior research and stuff which took a while :D… but yeah TOTALLY worth it!!!

Anyway so basically I thoroughly enjoyed the lectures for all of these, but yeah, all of them were information dense which made studying them all the harder, especially during the exam period… shall talk about this later 😀

I just thought I should say something about the subjects…. not much to say really, lectures and what not