Woohoo! Having finished all of my finals and homework assignments for this semester, I am officially halfway through my undergraduate studies! This semester was notable in the sense that it marked my first (and longest) time living entirely alone away from home, which required me to take care of myself in every possible way, including cooking. Thus, I learned a lot of life skills (arguably more than actual school knowledge), which gives me some confidence as I gradually approach adulthood and full independence.
These semester reflections function more like course reviews, with my personal thoughts sprinkled throughout but mainly below in the “Miscellaneous Thoughts” section. While I could probably write a lot more, I didn’t include anything super introspective mainly because I’m too lazy.
Overview
This semester (Spring 2021), my schedule ended up consisting of:
- CHEM 251 (Principles of Biological Chemistry)
- BIOL 124 (Introductory Organismal Biology Laboratory)
- BE 220 (Biomaterials)
- ENM 375 (Biological Data Science I – Fundamentals of Biostatistics)
- HSOC 102 (Bioethics)
I probably could have taken more classes, but as I learned last semester, success in life isn’t measured by how many classes I take.
CHEM 251 (Principles of Biological Chemistry)
Heading into this semester, CHEM 251 was probably the class I was scared of the most given its notoriously high difficulty ratings on Penn Course Review. I didn’t know how much organic chemistry I would be required to recall, and having taken CHEM 241 and 242 last summer rather than during the school year, I was scared I wouldn’t remember as much as my classmates. Furthermore, the two professors, Drs. Megan Matthews and Lara Kallander, seemed to be relatively new to Penn and had only previously taught a few courses which were all rated rather poorly. In my opinion, Biochemistry also represents the last hill premed students must surpass in terms of prerequisite classes, so I was just eager to finish this class and move on with my life. Beyond the course material, I was even terrified of the course structure from reading the syllabus. The course involved 4 exams, all of which were worth 100 points, and I couldn’t even drop one of them so I knew that every exam would be quite high stakes.
To say the course was poorly run would be a massive understatement. Dr. Matthews was slated to teach the first and fourth quarters of the course, while Dr. Kallander would teach the second and third quarters. Soon after starting, however, it became rather apparent that Dr. Matthews knew absolutely no idea what she was talking about. In her lecture recordings, she didn’t give “first time looking at these slides” vibes, but Dr. Matthews definitely gave at least “second time looking at these slides” vibes (she didn’t even create the slides herself, having taken them from a previous professor who taught the course). I really don’t feel like writing all my gripes down here, but Dr. Matthews’ lectures were just so disorganized. She mostly read directly from the slides and provided no depth of explanation whatsoever. Dr. Matthews also annoyingly kept saying “You guys should know this,” which confused everyone because we didn’t know whether she meant that we were supposed to have prerequisite knowledge from prior courses or we should be self-studying the topics since she clearly did not explain anything well. I didn’t personally attend her legendary first office hours, but I remember the class GroupMe going off about how she literally told students to Google things and didn’t explain anything because she was afraid she “would give test answers away.” That was extremely frustrating to hear, as I’m 100% sure she hadn’t even written her exam yet, and as an educator, she should be able to explain concepts without giving away test answers. She also posted an entire lecture as just the audio without the slides and was basically like “oops” afterward when we asked if she could rerecord. Around one week after the semester had started, I remember having a literal nightmare where I was going off on Dr. Matthews about how she clearly didn’t care about students’ well-being and learning experiences, even though she emphasized in her lectures how she was so committed to making students’ lives easier during this difficult pandemic and hearing our feedback about the course. That was definitely a wake-up call for myself, no pun intended.
As a result of Dr. Matthews’ questionable lectures, a bunch of students complained to the Chemistry Department Chair, Dr. Jeffrey Winkler. Suddenly, on the Sunday after only the third lecture, the class received a Canvas announcement that Dr. Matthews would no longer be involved with teaching CHEM 251 and that Dr. Kallander would be assuming full responsibilities for the course. Now, we were never officially told why Dr. Matthews was leaving the course. However, I’d like to believe that our complaints were the primary driving factor, and perhaps Dr. Winkler and Dr. Kallander watched Dr. Matthews’ lectures and agreed with the students that they were rather subpar (which would be supported by the fact that Dr. Kallander basically retaught the material covered in Dr. Matthews’ lectures). Anyways, while Dr. Kallander’s lectures were certainly better, I wouldn’t necessarily call them good. They mostly just involved her taking sentences and/or pictures straight out of the textbook, pasting them in her slides, and then reading off of them. Dr. Kallander provided little depth of knowledge and clearly didn’t know what she was talking about, and it was rather unclear as to what information was actually important for exams. Dr. Kallander sometimes even said blatantly wrong statements, and I honestly don’t know why people still attended her office hours, because she literally never knew how to answer people’s questions.
Fortunately, Dr. Kallander’s exams were quite easy. Again, I’m super confused as to why people kept asking her these complicated and hypothetical questions during office hours (e.g. about the practice problems in the back of the book) in hopes that they would somehow prepare them for the exam. I thought it was very evident that Dr. Kallander had absolutely no idea what she was talking about pertaining to biochemistry, rendering her unable to write very in-depth questions. The textbook was an OK supplement, but having finished the course now, I don’t think it was particularly necessary since exams were really just based off of what she covered in lecture. I studied so much for the first exam using the textbook and various YouTube videos, since the first quarter was such a mess given Dr. Matthews’ departure, but my efforts turned out very unnecessary. I should also mention that we had to complete weekly problem sets which started off extremely simple, but apparently some student mentioned to Dr. Kallander that the problem sets were too easy, so she asked the TAs to make them harder. I’m actually so salty at whoever was responsible for that change. If the problem sets had any relevance to the exams, I’d be more supportive. However, the TAs created the problem sets while Dr. Kallander made the exams, and she specifically said that the problem sets were irrelevant to her exam questions. Also considering the fact that problem sets were graded for correctness, there is absolutely no reason to make the problem sets harder. Fortunately, my TA Claire was the GOAT, being so helpful in guiding us through the questions and checking our answers during recitations.
BIOL 124 (Introductory Organismal Biology Laboratory)
I still hate lab courses, but at least taking BIOL 123 last semester helped prepare me for the sheer agony of completing labs by myself in BIOL 124. I pretty much performed all of my labs in my apartment, including the fetal pig and sheep organ dissections which were rather smelly due to the chemicals, and I also had to pee into a cup and analyze my own urine. I still maintain that while I don’t necessarily disagree with the decision to have students conduct labs at home, I don’t think I learned much more than I would have had they just provided data for us to analyze.
Anyways, BIOL 124 wasn’t all that much work (less so than BIOL 123), but it was annoying nonetheless. A week’s materials were released every Friday morning for us to review asynchronously, and I had to join a synchronous Zoom meeting on Mondays at 2PM to go over (and sometimes even complete) that week’s lab. Over the course of the week, I then had to conduct the lab and complete a post-lab assignment. Some of the labs were fairly straightforward, but others were exceedingly Chinese and took a lot of time to complete (much more than the normal 3 hours if we were in-person). At least one positive about this course is that they were very lenient with grading, and I do give them major props for doing the best they could given the pandemic situation. Fortunately, I’m now officially done with biology labs for my undergraduate career, but I still need to take organic chemistry lab later on which I will absolutely dread. Having taken both BIOL 123 and 124 at home now, I also have a box full of laboratory materials that I don’t know what to do with. I really don’t see myself ever needing to use 90% of these materials in any capacity, but I’m also too Chinese to throw it out. If anyone would like these materials or has any ideas on what I should do with them, please let me know.
BE 220 (Biomaterials)
Having not been the biggest fan of Biomechanics in BE 200 last semester, I headed into BE 220 with grand expectations. I thought that there was absolutely no way BE 220 could be worse than BE 200. Unfortunately, I was incorrect, because BE 220 was incredibly boring (but not particularly difficult). I never found any desire to care about the class during the semester, although I’m unsure whether that stemmed from the virtual learning circumstances or the actual material itself. The professor, Dr. Michael Mitchell, was such a meme, and I actually considered making a bingo board containing all of his iconic phrases like “You really hit the nail on the head.” He also read straight out of the textbook while talking about his slides, which was even funnier if you pulled up the textbook side-by-side and followed the sentences word-for-word as he went along. Like CHEM 251, BE 220 also involved four exams, but we were allowed to drop one so I literally stopped paying attention to the class after finessing the first three. I really appreciated the fact that Dr. Mitchell would tell you how much you were expected to write for each exam question by indicating like “1-2 sentences” or “no more than 4 sentences.” As an overthinker and overachiever, I often go to great lengths to answer questions to hopefully maximize my points, so constraining myself definitely helped me finish my exams on time and not be so Chinese. I also appreciated how they released homework answers beforehand, but since most of the questions involved justifying or explaining, you still couldn’t just copy the answer key. Furthermore, at the start of each lecture, groups of students had to give a Who’s Who presentation on a notable biomaterials researcher in the field. These presentations were technically only supposed to take 10 minutes, but they gave us a lot of material to cover in the rubric so most of the presentations ended up taking 20-30 minutes. Therefore, the accumulation of so many delays in Dr. Mitchell’s lectures meant that by the end of the course, we hadn’t finished covering all of the material according to the syllabus. We also had to complete a final project lab assignment in the same groups, which was fortunately graded rather leniently. So far, I have taken 4 semesters of BE classes as a bioengineering major, and I have hated all of them. Is that a good sign heading forward? Maybe, maybe not. I’m taking a graduate class in BE 583 (Molecular Imaging) next semester, which I sincerely hope will be much more enjoyable given that I actually chose to take it as an elective rather than it being a requirement.
ENM 375 (Biological Data Science I – Fundamentals of Biostatistics)
ENM 375 was technically supposed to be my biostatistics class, but I didn’t really learn any statistics at all. My professor, Dr. Vadim Markel, was a kind-hearted guy who taught us some probability, distributions, confidence intervals, etc. However, I’m salty I still don’t know how to run an ANOVA, and Dr. Markel just went on and on in his lectures about trivial mathematical derivations that I simply didn’t care about (I loved listening to his Russian accent, though). Furthermore, the homework assignments were all just MATLAB coding with little real relevance to statistics. Fortunately, the midterm and final were fairly straightforward, and there was a ton of extra credit in the class which pulled my grade through. I suppose my favorite moment concerning ENM 375 was in the assignment description for our BE 220 final project lab, which said: “Statistics: In this experiment assignment, you will utilize several statistical concepts. These concepts include measuring the properties of a material and comparing various properties among different fiber designs (you have 2 groups so this should tell you something about the statistics you should use). You are currently learning some of these techniques in ENM 375 but you are welcome to consult additional resources if needed.” Someone sent this in our BE GroupMe chat and was like “Are we though?” and I thought it was hilarious. That is all.
HSOC 102 (Bioethics)
HSOC 102 was the first bioethics class I have ever taken. It was conceptually pretty interesting at times, but also just downright draining most other times. We had synchronous discussion sections on Zoom every Wednesday from 10-11AM, as well as live recitations every Thursday from 6-7PM. We were annoyingly graded on participation, so I was forced to speak out much to my chagrin, but sometimes the world mandates that you sell out for those participation points. Most of the assignments were basically busy work where if you turned in the assignment, you’re probably getting an A (readings are a chore, though). They were designed to help us compile our final paper together in small increments, which aided in easing our workload at the end of the semester. It was actually so difficult to motivate myself to write my final paper, as I had mentally checked out a month before the end of the semester. Thus, I literally spent several days just trying to get started in some capacity. Fortunately, once I did, I finished writing in a couple of days, but I must say that I really hate literature reviews. I chose to write about human germline gene editing since I had written a blog post about that in senior year of high school (you can actually find that in one of my earlier posts on this blog). I suppose that one lesson I’m going to take away from this class is just how frequently the four core bioethical principles (autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice) are in conflict with each other, which makes making medical decisions extremely difficult because sometimes you have to sort of subjectively decide which ones you value more in a given scenario. Another lesson I’m going to take away from this class concerns the history of bioethics and how the field was “born in scandal and raised in protectionism,” and it was interesting to hear about how bioethics emerged out of incidences like Nuremberg and Tuskegee. I was also thankful to have learned how to apply the relevant bioethical principles to conversations within the ongoing pandemic like public health discussions and vaccination policies. Furthermore, through my final paper, I learned how to analyze a newspaper article within the broader scholarly bioethical field and examine how there is so much tension between and even within bioethical principles. The professor, Dr. Meggie Crnic, was very enthusiastic and helpful in getting me to think about how to consider all of the various bioethical issues in certain case studies. Still, humanities are humanities, and I can only be so entertained by them.
Conclusions
Overall, I felt like I had a lot more free time in the second half of this semester than I initially thought I would. Pretty much all of my classes were more boring and less time-consuming than I had anticipated, but I’m thankful that God gave me the extra time to go outside more often and meet with people after having been stuck at home for 10 months. Unlike last semester where I felt like I was drowning in my classes, I had many opportunities to breathe over these last few months. I tried to cherish the lighter workload as much as possible, knowing that starting next semester I would embark on a much busier premed grind with MCAT preparations and medical school applications after that. I really enjoyed cooking for and taking care of myself in my peaceful studio apartment, and I will continue to live in the same one during the next academic year. Cheers to a relaxing yet productive summer ahead of me!
Miscellaneous Thoughts
I was also very thankful that I was able to physically go into lab this semester. Having joined the Winkelstein Lab in the middle of last semester as part of the Rachleff Scholars program, I mainly focused on getting situated into the lab space and learning the relevant immunohistochemistry and protein labeling protocols for my upcoming summer project. I learned a lot from my graduate student mentor, Sonia, in the two months before she defended her thesis, and I hope that I will succeed on my own without her presence in the lab. I wouldn’t say I’m the most ardent lab rat, but it certainly felt very nice to be able to contribute toward meaningful work in-person again.
I continued to serve this semester for RCF (shoutouts Pineapple Poiema), but I’d say that it certainly felt more tiresome compared to the fall. There was always a sense of disconnect in our CG, since our entire servants team was on campus but many of our members were learning from home. Moreover, we went through Ecclesiastes in accordance with the Sunday sermons last semester, but this semester, we read through the Gospel Growth book which was honestly very draining and not particularly helpful in my opinion. I won’t be serving next year due to other time commitments, but I did appreciate the opportunity to have learned what it means to faithfully serve the church over this past academic year.
I’d like to say that my health slightly improved this semester despite cooking for and looking after myself (I don’t think it got worse, at least). I was able to consistently take walks around campus nearly every day, sometimes alone and sometimes with other people. I still sat at my computer most of the time, but I did partake in physical activity at RCF field days and other shenanigans. I also think the back cushion on my chair as well as my 27” monitor helped reduce the strain on my body imposed by so many hours of studying, and perhaps my softer mattress actually is optimal for my sideways sleeping position. Anyways, I should definitely put more effort into taking care of my body, but I’ve also been saying this for the past 20 years. Nice!
Most importantly, I made new friends this semester! Now, I’m not going to list all of the people I grew closer to, nor am I going to record all of my thoughts about the two people I will mention. However, considering that I really didn’t talk to anyone while I was learning from home last year, I’m truly thankful to have become such great friends with DJin and Esther (hi to you both if you’re reading this). I already knew DJin from having joined FM together in Fall 2019, but we weren’t on the level of friends where I could comfortably reach out to him out of nowhere to just talk to or grab a meal with. Having hung out on numerous occasions this semester, however, DJin and I are now true homies, and he’s definitely someone I feel extremely comfortable talking with (and hugging). As for Esther, I had never talked to her before this semester, and we only met up for the first time during spring break because I’m such a great big (today is actually the two month anniversary of our first meal together at Don Memos). But having hung out with Esther for what seems like every day for the past two months, she’s arguably my closest friend right now and someone I know I can just be myself around. Anyways, I’m very grateful that God placed these two people in my life, because I definitely felt very alone at times while learning from home, not knowing who my closest friends actually were in college. There were many people whom I was acquaintances with, but not many whom I would say I was particularly close with and could easily reach out to at any time. Clearly the Lord provides, so yay! Friends are exciting!