Hey Bruins!

So I took this class during the apocalyptic COVID-19 season in the Spring so take what you can from this review.

Overall, Professor Clarke is truly the GOAT in MCDB department. She has this tiny Australian(?) accent going on so I enjoyed her lectures because I really liked her voice.

This professor is quite fair and very involved in student learning, even during the pandemic. This pandemic season was honestly such a rough time for every one, so I appreciated the fact that Professor Clarke was really accommodating and understanding of her students.

Class material-wise, I thought the topics discussed in MCDB 144 was honestly very challenging at times because of all the pathways and mechanisms we had to learn on top of the data-interpretation (which is the bulk of all the tests and quizzes). To really excel in this class, data-interpretation has to be intuitive to most. Her exams and quizzes go pretty quickly, so when presented with data, you have to know what is going on and catch on quickly to answer the questions.

I had Jordan as my TA during this time. Overall, I thought he did a great job on explaining what strategies to use and how to tackle data interpretation questions. Also this man was quite hilarious and made my Monday 8AM discussion so much more enjoyable than it ever could have been.

In all, great professor and teaching staff! Not only will you guys learn a tremendous amount throughout this class, but y'all will actually enjoy it!

This class is definitely doable if you put in the hours. There is a LOT of detailed material, and the short answer sections of her exam do involve being able to recall material from the slides and briefly explain. You either know it or you don't. The data interpretation part (50% of the final) can be more tricky, but it helps to pay close attention to the experiments she presents during lecture and the way she breaks it down for the class. Highly recommend listening to podcasts as much as possible to really drill the info in your head, but also go to lecture! She used the previous year's podcasts for our class, so there were some differences. Overall, she's a very engaging woman and it's a fair class.

Out of the 3 courses I have taken for my core MCDB classes, I would say that by far my most favorite class had to be MCDB 144 with Dr. Clark. As opposed to the professors I had for 165a and 138, Dr. Clark ensured that this class was not us memorizing a bunch of pathways but rather understanding the big idea behind topics covered in class and being able to design experiments.

There is only 1 midterm in this class (~5th week) and it is worth 35%. The exams have two "sections," the first section involves short answer questions and this usually entails 1 sentence answers or even one word answers depending on the question. The second section of the exam is the "long answer" portion and this greatly focuses on being able to interpret the data presented while also being able to outline designing an experiment to test a particular idea.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed MCDB 144 with Dr. Clark and I would definitely recommend this professor to any person that is seeking to take a class with a very caring and direct professor.