Course shopping, music meme
Feb. 2nd, 2006 03:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirLowell House, on the Presentation of Child Jesus in the Temple
Out of the 20 people signed up for Systems Biology 101 this semester, 5 (including me) are Korean, and 2 of them (not including me) are in my section. Weird. Also, why is my section overwhelmingly male? -_-
I'm taking Systems Biology and Molecular Ecology and Evolution back to back on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The first is taught by mathematicians from the medical school, the second by a professor from the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) department. Since I'm a biochemical sciences major, all my biology courses so far have been taught by professors from the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) department, and for the most part, I instinctively think like an MCB student. Which means I think in terms of molecules: transcription factors binding to DNA, enzymes binding to substrate. Not in terms of mathematical models and circuit diagrams and not in terms of phylogenetic trees and ecological relationships. Throughout the introductory lectures for both courses, which have a heavy computational focus (MATLAB modeling in the former, bioinformatics in the latter), I kept wondering in knee-jerk fashion, "But where are the gels? Where are the mutant screens? Where are the experiments?" >_>
Also disorienting was that the two courses very much address the same fundamental questions and concerns. How do we account for biological diversity given the degree of conservation in genomes? How can we explain evolution, on the species and subspecies level, and connect genotypic change with phenotypic change? How does biological complexity emerge from its components? The two courses threw around the same ideas and even quoted from the same people, but the worldviews involved could not be more completely different. Systems Biology used a "microscopic" language, referring to regulatory networks at the molecular and cellular level, while Molecular Ecology and Evolution thought macroscopically, in terms of species and populations. A complete Twilight Zone experience. O_O
That is not to say I didn't like the courses. On the contrary, I have a feeling I'll learn a lot this semester. I admit that the OEB course does seem a little, well, fluffy at times (where are the mechanisms?!) and the Systems Biology course will require a mathematical rigor that I'm not used to seeing in biology. But the lecturers are interesting, and learning these skills will be an enormous help to the current research we're doing in the CGR. And well, these are the questions in biology that interest me most, although my perspective on them is different from both courses.
What's ironic is that Biological Sciences 56, which is the physical biochemistry course that has never received a CUE guide above 4.0 (in a scale from 1 to 5) and is notorious among concentrators for being both difficult and boring, just may prove to be one biology course this semester that will feel the most "comfortable" for me. Actually, I think they've made some improvements to BS 56 this semester, especially since they reduced the faculty to just one lecturer, Prof. Guidotti. He's pretty funny actually, and I really liked the first lecture, where he explained that the cell, far from being a bag of cytoplasm where proteins swim about in a sea of solvent, is actually very crowded and tightly packed with proteins. It was an eye-opener and completely changed my conceptualization of how cellular processes worked. Not bad for a one-hour lecture, neh? I do hope physical chemistry won't traumatize me like organic chemistry did. ;_; But everyone says p-chem is much, much worse than o-chem, so I don't know what to think.
Neat music meme taken from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
petronia: Do you trust my taste in music? Pick a number between 1 and 1985 and I'll find the corresponding song in my playlist. I'll upload it for you (and everyone else reading this entry) to grab. [Optional: when you've gotten a song from me, go post this meme in your own journal, so I can grab a random song from you.]
I find it appropriate that the number of songs I have in iTunes at the moment is also my birth year. ^_^ (I went and created a shuffled playlist with all the songs in my library, so it all should be pretty random. Oh, and contrary to appearances, most of my music isn't Korean. -_-)
Yours &c.
Out of the 20 people signed up for Systems Biology 101 this semester, 5 (including me) are Korean, and 2 of them (not including me) are in my section. Weird. Also, why is my section overwhelmingly male? -_-
I'm taking Systems Biology and Molecular Ecology and Evolution back to back on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The first is taught by mathematicians from the medical school, the second by a professor from the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) department. Since I'm a biochemical sciences major, all my biology courses so far have been taught by professors from the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) department, and for the most part, I instinctively think like an MCB student. Which means I think in terms of molecules: transcription factors binding to DNA, enzymes binding to substrate. Not in terms of mathematical models and circuit diagrams and not in terms of phylogenetic trees and ecological relationships. Throughout the introductory lectures for both courses, which have a heavy computational focus (MATLAB modeling in the former, bioinformatics in the latter), I kept wondering in knee-jerk fashion, "But where are the gels? Where are the mutant screens? Where are the experiments?" >_>
Also disorienting was that the two courses very much address the same fundamental questions and concerns. How do we account for biological diversity given the degree of conservation in genomes? How can we explain evolution, on the species and subspecies level, and connect genotypic change with phenotypic change? How does biological complexity emerge from its components? The two courses threw around the same ideas and even quoted from the same people, but the worldviews involved could not be more completely different. Systems Biology used a "microscopic" language, referring to regulatory networks at the molecular and cellular level, while Molecular Ecology and Evolution thought macroscopically, in terms of species and populations. A complete Twilight Zone experience. O_O
That is not to say I didn't like the courses. On the contrary, I have a feeling I'll learn a lot this semester. I admit that the OEB course does seem a little, well, fluffy at times (where are the mechanisms?!) and the Systems Biology course will require a mathematical rigor that I'm not used to seeing in biology. But the lecturers are interesting, and learning these skills will be an enormous help to the current research we're doing in the CGR. And well, these are the questions in biology that interest me most, although my perspective on them is different from both courses.
What's ironic is that Biological Sciences 56, which is the physical biochemistry course that has never received a CUE guide above 4.0 (in a scale from 1 to 5) and is notorious among concentrators for being both difficult and boring, just may prove to be one biology course this semester that will feel the most "comfortable" for me. Actually, I think they've made some improvements to BS 56 this semester, especially since they reduced the faculty to just one lecturer, Prof. Guidotti. He's pretty funny actually, and I really liked the first lecture, where he explained that the cell, far from being a bag of cytoplasm where proteins swim about in a sea of solvent, is actually very crowded and tightly packed with proteins. It was an eye-opener and completely changed my conceptualization of how cellular processes worked. Not bad for a one-hour lecture, neh? I do hope physical chemistry won't traumatize me like organic chemistry did. ;_; But everyone says p-chem is much, much worse than o-chem, so I don't know what to think.
Neat music meme taken from
petronia: Do you trust my taste in music? Pick a number between 1 and 1985 and I'll find the corresponding song in my playlist. I'll upload it for you (and everyone else reading this entry) to grab. [Optional: when you've gotten a song from me, go post this meme in your own journal, so I can grab a random song from you.]I find it appropriate that the number of songs I have in iTunes at the moment is also my birth year. ^_^ (I went and created a shuffled playlist with all the songs in my library, so it all should be pretty random. Oh, and contrary to appearances, most of my music isn't Korean. -_-)
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:14 pm (UTC)1917!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:25 pm (UTC)이승기 - Paradise
nuthin wrong with pop music
Date: 2006-02-02 09:29 pm (UTC)Thanks!
Re: nuthin wrong with pop music
Date: 2006-02-02 09:51 pm (UTC)And thanks for the encouragement below! ^_^ (Three physics classes plus research sounds unimaginably intense, since I found intro mechanics and E&M overwhelming enough. @_@)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:35 pm (UTC)Good luck! Go Tari! Rah! Rah!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:42 pm (UTC)Sainkho Namtchylak - Dance of Eagle
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 01:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 01:19 am (UTC)Mùm - Nightly Cares
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 05:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-04 03:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 06:12 am (UTC)For the meme: Umm... 731! ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-04 03:16 am (UTC)Bruno Pelletier - A travers toi (featuring Sylvain Cossette)
And thanks~ Will do my best!