BIOL 3000

I took this course in Spring 2023 as a first year. I personally loved it! I don't truly understand why the reviews for Keith are so bad. I think his lectures are super straightforward and make a lot of sense. Although I ended up with an A in the class, I think it was due to the fact that Cell was my main focus the entire semester. I also studied for cell practically every single day and attended every single one of his group office hours, which I highly recommend, and never missed a lecture. Keith is very good at explaining things and is also very fair and reasonable. I found his exam questions to be a range from very easy simple fact recitation to difficult reasoning/application questions. However, I think all the questions he asked were valid, even if somewhat annoying sometimes (ex. I got a question wrong because I didn't notice that he had made something plural rather than singular) and if you know your stuff, you will be okay. Do the practice questions after every lecture, before discussion (which I also recommend going to and not missing)! Reading the textbook is useful enough, but I think his lectures provided a good base for the readings. I did the readings before every lecture for the first 3 exams and took notes, but I found that was unnecessary and a big waste of time. For the last exam, I tried doing the readings after the lectures and found that to be more helpful. I also stopped taking detailed notes on the readings. Overall, I loved this class despite the difficulty. Just make sure you pay attention, ask questions in office hours, do the practice questions, do the readings for deeper understanding, and you will be fine. I found Keith to be a funny and genuinely nice/helpful guy, even if he is a character. Good luck, you got this!

Kozminski’s lectures are very passionate and very clear. He is extremely kind and open to answer questions/reexplain things (after class). The fact that the lectures are so good makes the grading system suck even more because you have constant anxiety over the next exam instead of being able to pay attention in class. The 3rd and 4th exams especially are information overload, with way way too many topics on them at once. The grade breakdown is fair though, since you only need about a 75% in the class to get a B. As long as you go in understanding you probably will not get an A, the class gets much better. Definitely a course where you will struggle if you care more about your grade than the content you’re learning. Regardless I still think there needed to either be 5 exams or some kind of extra buffer to your grade or both.

If you get a choice, take this class with Koz. He is a great lecturer, talking slowly so you can get your notes down and cracking jokes in the middle of the lecture. However, he doesn't record lectures so you have to record them yourself. This guy is a walking book of knowledge as well, and he is very helpful in office hours. However, your whole grade in the class is based on 4 exams, which kinda sucks. Additionally, they are very difficult to get over an 80 on if you do not fully know the content- there's a lot of good answer choices. I felt all of the exams were fair and there was nothing super nit-picky on them. The final is not cumulative, though, and there is enough leeway that if you do badly on one you can come back from it. Cell is a hard class, but if you take it with Koz it will be much more enjoyable.

There's no doubt that this is one of the hardest courses I have taken as a neuroscience major. There is just a lot of information and you really need to understand how everything works very well in order to be able to apply your knowledge. I feel like the exams were pretty fair, you just really need to allocate a lot of time to studying. But the information is very important and applicable and I enjoyed how he talked a lot about the experiments that established our knowledge of biology. The lectures are not recorded and I honestly dont know how people get by without going. The homework questions are very helpful though. #tCFS25

This class is for sure a tough one, but I enjoyed Kozminski as a professor and lecturer. He does a good job of emphasizing was is/is not important from the slides during lecture (he will literally say "hint hint" when discussing certain things). I did not read the textbook except for a few times if I was confused a specific pathway/protein. Everything he tests you on he discussing in class or specifically tells you to go read a certain page in the textbook. There is so much information in this class that you have to try and study a little bit every day if you want to do well. What worked for me was making flashcards with all of the material and studying them periodically in the weeks leading up to the exam because there are so many different proteins, pathways, and molecules to know that you cannot cram a few days before the exam. The exam questions are designed to trip you up so the more exposure you get with the material the easier it will be to catch the trick questions. It is important to know the experiments he talks about because he will ask about them on the exams. He is super helpful in office hours and so are the TAs! The first exam is least heavily weighted which is nice because you can get used to his style of exams without worrying about it completely tanking your grade. The final is not cumulative. Biggest advice would be to do the take-home questions because sometimes he will literally take some of them and put them directly on the test. Overall even though this class is a beast it was incredibly rewarding in terms of how much you learn.