This course is divided into three parts. The first two profs tried to incorporate a sort of model to aid the curriculum.

Dr. Jacobs - Cell Bio
- had a virus model. Seemed irrelevant until after the unit which is kind of unfortunate because understanding was crammed to the end....

Click here to read the entire review

Apparently the only difference is that the new book has some sections on research in Canada, so you should be good. Again, at worst you'll need to do a bit of photocopying from a friend if those sections are required reading. And borrowing a book is definitely better than buying it :p

Originally Posted by Marlowe

Apparently the only difference is that the new book has some sections on research in Canada, so you should be good. Again, at worst you'll need to do a bit of photocopying from a friend if those sections are required reading. And borrowing a book is definitely better than buying it :p

I don't really want to buy the new textbook if the differences aren't huge :S.

Had the Course in the Fall in 2010/2011.

I had Dr. Kajuira, she seems like a genuinely nice lady but uhhh, on the professor end of the continuum, there areissues.

FIRSTLY, she can be a bit patronizing at times, spend lengths of time to tell you how to study. Now, that's a personal opinion, i'm sure there were some kids that might have benefited from her pep talks, i didn't. Another issue here is that while she's trying to ease you into the course, she was actually one of my most intimidating professors, like before a midterm i'd be told "study the textbook, study supplemental information and images posted online, study the student forum I created, study the skeleton notes, study the key words at the end of the notes." In the end, you'll get 90% of your questions from the skeleton notes, and 9.99% of the questions from everything else but the textbook. you'll never get textbook-only questions, even if she'll say you will (at least in my experience). Often times though, you'll need to read the textbook anyways, for reasons i'll discuss in part 3.

SECONDLY, she spends a lot of time promoting a charity club that she is part of called iGnite, it's a good cause and all that, so you can never hate her too much for it, but still, a lot of class (and real estate on AvenueToLearn) is used to update iGnite members or promote iGnite activities, which can seem a bit unnecessary with a group of people in which the majority aren't even a part of the organization. Her incentive to get you to join is a reference letter, not a stellar, academic, gets-you-into-med school reference letter but more of a "this person helped with volunteering activities, give them a job please" type of letter. Still, if you're a keener looking to make professor contacts, Kajuira + iGnite might be a place to start.

FINALLY, and this is the big one, she glosses over a lot of key concepts very quickly. May not be her fault, there's a lot to cover. She gives you "skeleton notes", where you're supposed to fill in the blanks, and basically if something isn't a blank that needs to be filled in, she'll run over it very quickly. I specifically remember a lecture on micro-tubules where I came out with no idea about what had happened. This is why you need to read the textbook (as mentioned in part 1)

With all of that said, she almost always teaches this course across both semesters, and the summers, so she may be unavoidable, learn to live with her, it's not too hard, she's nice really, i feel mean saying some of the stuff above, her class is just...not fun.

Secondly I had Dr. Boreham, considering the boring reputation most of the first year bio profs have, you want to aim for his class. He will keep you awake, he will keep you entertained. I don't have too much to say about him, a few issues nonetheless:

Firstly, he likes to test some extraneous information, like he kept telling us that all the DNA in your body can stretch to the sun and back many times, then he asked us this in on a test, but changed it to the DNA in one cell (not your entire body), and the answer changed obviously, I fell for the trick, countless other people did, so yea, he can be tricky. But uhh, these minor tricks aside, his questions aren't too hard. The hardest questions you'll encounter aren't even from his own material, but rather from guest speakers he brought in through the years.

Secondly, he's unusually aware about what you should have learned already in high school, like DNA replication, so he won't teach it in detail, usually he'll use the extra time for something fun and you won't mind it, but nonetheless, if you're rusty on some high school stuff, you'll need to review the textbook.

Also, and this is so amazing, He has a 5 minute break in the middle of each lecture, this is SO GOOD. KEEPS YOU AWAKE. during the break he often plays music, one time some girls did a dance on stage, it was hard to watch but it was entertaining.

Now for the course:

the material is 60-70% high school review, usually they'll add a few more details that weren't covered in high school. It may even be easier than high school in a way because you don't cover any anatomy, physiology, glycolisis or the krebs cycle. the labs are the major issue. Major issue in the sense that they are the most boring component of an already boring course (personally). Often depends on who your TA is, but they are generally instructed to keep marks at a certain low standard and my TA told us she got yelled at for giving us relatively higher marks. I didn't mind lol. Labs are usually unrelated entirely to the course material, and thus they get their own lab exam. the lab exam is easy, but you need to have your lab book in order. The bio department is so annoying about this as opposed to the chem department, you need to rewrite the entire procedure in your lab notebook, you will also be tested on random barcodes and whatnot. I just got together with one or two friends and compared all the info we had in our lab books and we made sure we all had the complete info. Worked out well. For the final, i'd suggest paying attention to the content breakdown they give you (usually one professor writes 2/3rds of a test), still study the other prof though, or the maximum you can get is 66%. From time to time, a multiple choice question from the midterms will reappear on the final, so picking up your marked midterms, and later reviewing them, is highly recommended. The midterms have a written component to them, the final does not.

Can't think of anything else, feel free to msg me on macinsiders for specific questions.

Good luck!

I enjoyed this course as a whole and loved both Dr. Kajuira and Dr. Boreham. Dr. Kajuira was always very welcoming and easy to talk to and encouraged students to visit her during office hours and ask questions. Dr. Boreham didn't seem too excited about professor-student interactions, I don't think he ever had office hours, but he was a great prof nonetheless. His lectures were extremely interesting and fun and I honestly looked forward to them! (BIO 1M03 was a shock the next semester) Anyways the thing I disliked about this course was the labs, honestly for me chem labs were like leisure time compared to bio labs. I was always super stressed and anxious, this is mostly due to the TA I had who was a bit intimidating at first. Some of the labs had waaay too much work to be finished in three hours. The directions aren't that clear and since I was scared to ask my TA anything I guess that's why I didn't enjoy the labs so much.

My friend had a much better lab experience but her TA was way more lenient with things and more friendly. It's just the luck you have! And a good lab partner doesn't hurt.

Does anyone know how Professor Zhu, X is like? S/he is teaching first term with Kajiura, and I'm wondering if I should pick Term 1 (Kajiura & Zhu) or Term 2 (Kajiura & Wilson).

Originally Posted by ShikabaneMai

Does anyone know how Professor Zhu, X is like? S/he is teaching first term with Kajiura, and I'm wondering if I should pick Term 1 (Kajiura & Zhu) or Term 2 (Kajiura & Wilson).

I don't think I've heard of Zhu teaching Bio 1A03 before, at least not for the past couple of years. There's the ratemyprofs page, but I don't really think that means much ( http://www.ratemyprofessors. com/Sh...p?tid=8 17062) However, I've also heard negative reviews about Wilson as well.

Dumbconsumer may have broken down the course the best, so I won't dwell further on what he already mentioned, but I will add that many of the midterm practice questions Kajiura posted on avenue appeared (to some variation) on the first midterm. Even if they all weren't directly on the midterm, answering the questions helps reiterate the content and greatly aids in understanding other questions that may be asked.

In regards to Wilson, I've heard she's a brutal test-maker. I sat in on one of her lectures (I was in Kajiura/Boreham's core) and it was painfully dull. I feel that if you're more of an independent study-er, you can still do well in her class, but if you require clear and interesting presentation of the content then you may be better off with another professor (I can't comment on Zhu, unfortunately, because I haven't heard of him/her).

Yeah I liked this course. It was a good first year biolgy introduction. Dr. Kajiura has really great notes that allow you to write in your own notes durnig her lecture. I reccomend going to each of her lectures, she usually hints about what she will be testing. Besides this course is worth going to, it's interesting and you will definately come out of this course knowing a lot more about carbohydrates, lipids and proteins than you ever thought!!

take this course in the summer. It's only kajiura and it is very very managable

I posted this as a reply to someone asking about the labs in another thread and I thought it might be useful.

Bio 1A03 labs are a little more intense, for first year anyway. During the first week or two of class, you'll have 3 skills lab to complete as prep for your real labs and to ensure everyone knows the basic techniques and it counts as a 3% completion mark towards yoru grade. For us (2 years ago), they were as follows:
-Using the Micropipette
-Aseptic Techniques
-Microscopy.

There will be TA's there to help you and you need their signature to show that you've successfully completed your skills labs. As for the actual labs, there was no pre-lab, however, from what I remember, you need to write down purpose, hypothesis, materials, etc before the lab, because you won't have time to write them in lab. And draw any tables and such that are needed. Basically prep everything that you can do out of lab to minimize your writing in lab. You get this information based on the lab documents that you print out off of Avenue but just put it in your own words/summarize them. And at the end of the experiment, you take down your observations and include anything the TA asked for so that he/she can sign the end of your lab before you leave. IN other words, you can'd add in any more info after the TA has signed it and you weren't allowed to leave any blank spaces (large chunks or) anything. My TA was pretty strict about that though, I'm not sure if all the TA's were like that.

The informal labs included an 1% quiz for each, they were:
Biological Molecules: involved paper chromatography, and separation of 2 amino acids.
Microscopy: Using 2 bacteria and growing them in-culture, looking at variability within plant cell size, and also looking at other cell-types.
Microbio and antibiotics: Using antibiotics on the 2 bacteria cultures made in lab 2 (E.Coli and M.Luteus) and looking at the efficacy of 4 antibiotics on both.
DNA Analysis: Running Gel electrophoresis with DNA

And there was one formal lab..

Recent course outline: http://bio.mcmaster.ca/courses/ugrad... 02010-11.pdf

Great course, very interesting material. I didn't like Kajiura b/c she can't get to the point and wastes my time, but Wilson was much better b/c she expected you to know the material better and moved at a quicker pace in lectures. Wilson contributed the majority of the questions on the final exam though, and let me just say it was pretty f*cking hard for some of the questions, really had to apply your knowledge.

Great info, Thanks!

I took it last spring. If you are taking this course make sure you write all details in your lab notebook (detailed procedure, why you used a particular substance or reagent, name/model # of equipment used...) so you can do well on the lab exam. If you have dr. Kajiura, spend some time looking at the diagrams that she posts on avenue (a lot of her questions are based on these diagrams).

Bio1a03 is a pretty good course mostly cause of the profs. Dr. Kajiura is so nice and gives you study questions before midterms that are almost the same as the questions on the midterms. She also gives out really detailed lecture outlines. Dr. Boreham is fun and keeps lectures interesting so you'll find it easy absorbing the information from his lectures, regardless of how hard the material may seem.

I thought it was a pretty straight-forward course. It's easy to do well if you attend class. A few of the labs were tedious...