[Eva C]

Cell Biology is mostly a mandatory course for a lot of students in Biology and Biochemistry. It really depends on what type of a person you are in your learning style and the way you like to take tests. Some say its boring while others think it is easy and interesting. For me, I'm the interested one.

Course: The course in general builds on the information you learn from Bio1A03. You learn about the cell, the structures, molecular biology, how proteins are tranlsated and how they are transported to different parts of the cell. It looks at everything at a cellular level. Therefore, there can be very specific information that you need to know. Each pathway of how things get transported is different and similar. So it can start getting a bit confusing when trying to differentate everything. I suggest making tables to seperate the topics, it helps alot! At the end of the course, we talk about cancer and how it works, it was really interesting to me.

Labs: Once again, my opinion is seems different from all my friends. My friends loved it cause it was easy and didn't take all 3 hours. I hated it because i didn't get to learn anything new and it wasn't even that interesting. the lab report was boring and pointless in my opinion. Reminded me of Bio1A03 labs. And once again there is the lab test, so make sure your notebook is good. So here is the list of the lab topics and decide for yourself.

1. Lab 1- Microscopy, Cells and Tissues
2. Lab 2- Enzyme activity
3. Lab 3- Enzyme kinetics
4. Lab 4- Cellular fractionation, isolation of mitochondria

Tests: They were not that hard. However, it is one of those course that require you to memorize the details in the lecture note and write it back out on the paper. There isn't a lot of application to the questions. Just mostly, if you know the material or not. The profs give practice questions which is a good indication of what the test will be like. If you know the practice questions, you should do well.

Overall, I think if you put the effort in it to study and read the lecture notes, go to class and listen to the hits that Dr. Dej/ Cameron gives, then it is not that hard to get a good mark.

COURSE BREAKDOWN

• Test 1- 15%
• Test 2 - 20%
• Assignments - 5%
• Laboratory work - 20% (4 labs)
• Final Exam- 40%

cell bio is not a bad course, you just need to focus on the lecture note and make sure to read over the practice tests before the tests and memorize all the details in your notes for the test

On the Titles website, the textbook for this course is listed under optional materials. Did you guys buy the book or find it useful at all?

Hey would you recommend taking this in the summer?

Originally Posted by sinthusized

Hey would you recommend taking this in the summer?

I think you could probably do it, the course, in terms of workload, I found is very manageable workload wise, because if you go and listen in the lectures, it helps you a lot. Dr Dej talks a lot about the logic of the experiments, making sure you have an understanding of it, which really helps.

On the Titles website, the textbook for this course is listed under optional materials. Did you guys buy the book or find it useful at all?

The book is great, and very useful. You can find a lot of details which will help with understanding some of the more difficult concepts, and the diagrams are great. Plus, its used in some 3rd year courses, so its not a bad investment.

Overall a really good course. The material is pretty interesting and well explained by Dr. Dej. If you have any trouble with concepts they are also well explained in the textbook. If you have taken any other lab course before, 2B03 labs will seem really boring, but generally as long as you fill out the lab report with exactly what they ask, it's easy marks.

I took this course in the 2009 semester with Dr. Dej, and Dr. Papaconstantinou (a new post graduate student who was a "student teacher"). I loved taking this with Dr. Dej, she was an awesome teacher! She explained things so well. She definitely rushed quite a bit, so if I hadn't had my laptop with me, I wouldn't have been able to get things down quickly enough. But otherwise, she made things really easy. The tests were very very fair, in my opinion. It was definitely almost completely just memorization though. However I think Dr. Dej realized that people were just memorizing so for the last test and the exam, she made it a little bit more application based (but it was still very fair, as long as you had studied). There was also a unit about cancer which was extremely interesting.

The labs were okay, I honestly was hoping for the labs to be free marks, and they definitely were. It also depends on your TA, but the labs were very easy, fill-in-the-blank reports, and the lab test was REALLY easy as long as you wrote everything down in your lab notebook. (I barely wrote anything down throughout the year and the week before the test I just wrote stuff in that was posted on Learnlink in the appendices, but throughout the year I also wrote down catalogue numbers, and changes to the procedures, details which will appear on the lab test). They also didn't take the whole 3 hours. So yeah, the labs aren't particularly educational, a slight waste of time, but if you put the effort in, it's an easy way to bring up your mark.

Anyway, all in all, I thought this class was (1) interesting, (2) very fair, as long as you studied and went to class, (3) easy to get an awesome mark in, if you put the effort in.

And regarding the textbook, I used mine in the lot in the beginning when I was still super keen and did all the readings. Didn't happen towards the end. But I still thought it was a good textbook and good to fill in the blanks in my knowledge when I had missed some classes. However I found that the tests and stuff were almost entirely based on the lecture slides.

This year, they've taken out the lab and added a 2 hour tutorial instead. I'm really curious about the new course outline.

Ummm, in the master time table the tutorial only lasts 1 hour... In the course calendar it says two hours... confusing....

Maybe its like the reverse of what Genetics (2C03) was for 2008-2009. It was scheduled for 2 hours, never needed more than 1.

I heard that they replaced the labs with online labs from someone in one of my classes. I'm taking 2b03 in summer (anyone else?) and I filled out a survey from an email I got from lori goff about how we feel about online labs etc so rumour may be true. Anyways, people taking it in the summer will have normal labs though but I heard we get to do one online lab as sort of a trial.

Online labs would be quite nice, although it seems the type of thing that would be really easy to forget about. Regardless, I am quite excited for this course!

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

Online labs would be quite nice, although it seems the type of thing that would be really easy to forget about. Regardless, I am quite excited for this course!

Sidebar, BIO PSYCH!
Yes, good to see the new generation is alive!

I'm technically enrolled in BioPsych right now, but I'm still debating changing before the semester starts. It seems like my tuition sharply increased from last year, and I'm trying to figure out if that is because I picked BioPsych or because of natural rises.

Do you recall a large difference between your first and second year's tuition when you picked it?

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

I'm technically enrolled in BioPsych right now, but I'm still debating changing before the semester starts. It seems like my tuition sharply increased from last year, and I'm trying to figure out if that is because I picked BioPsych or because of natural rises.

Do you recall a large difference between your first and second year's tuition when you picked it?

I think it's just because tuition increased. It could also be because of the amount of the different types of courses you take. Each faculty and even departments have different tuition prices per unit.