Professor
Carrie Spratford
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2021 - I have never left a review for a class before. I’m an "A student" and have not had a problem with a class at UCLA before. BUT, after seeing it listed in the classes for W’22, I feel obligated to give an in-person perspective given how different it feels from the online sentiments here, so that people know what they are really signing up for. The professor is amazing as the other reviewers say. She really cares about us learning the material and how research is conducted. She works very hard (even through the night sometimes) to get us all feedback on assignments. I feel that I have learned a lot about research that is truly valuable in the real world beyond any other class so far here at UCLA. Another pro to the class is that she doesn’t care that much about grades. I predict most of the class will get an A, just like other quarters. However, this is by NO MEANS AN EASY A. It seems simple enough: weekly quizzes and M,T,W,R homework assignments are all completion-based and due the next Monday. Completing them sincerely will take a few hours out of your week. Content is hyper-focused, but it is taught well. Seems easy right? The catch is that this ALL CHANGES WITH THE MIDTERM PREP starting WEEK 4. This goes from a 6 unit class to about a 10 unit class in a matter of 2 weeks. You have to write a grant proposal which is very technical, completely cited, includes two scientific figures from scratch, and is upwards of 3000 words in a WEEK. You cannot work ahead on this assignment, you only get a week. Then, the professor will give you upwards of +100 in-depth, technical comments on that paper to incorporate into the next draft in another week. And she then encourages you to turn that draft in BEFORE the week is up so that you can receive another 70-80 comments on the draft and incorporate all of that information in whatever time you have left. To be fair, the professor did give a lot of extensions to students who were struggling to keep up with this massive homework assignment in Week 4, but they were a day or two beyond the week deadline. For reference, I dumped about 50 hours of my life into writing this assignment over those two weeks. Then at the beginning of Week 6, you go from theoretical readings and a little bit of lab practice in the scheduled two 3-hour times to a commitment paralleling joining an actual research lab here (+10 ADDITIONAL lab hours a week) ON TOP of regular course work for the class. You need to be in the lab to dissect, stage, and image 15 lymph glands using a process that some graduate students struggle with. This is the only thing I have encountered at UCLA which is truly SKILL-based. If you suck at dissecting things smaller than your forceps in timed, 20 minute windows, you just need to put in more time and set up more crosses. Lots of the "best" (most technically and mechanically adept) students have struggled to even get 7-8 lymph glands after about 10-12 additional hours of work a week because you can loose them at every stage in the process and are very fragile. The online students were just given images, but we have had to create all of our data ourselves. It pushed this class from borderline manageable to near impossible if you had a full schedule where you expected this class to only be 6 units large (15-18 hours a week total). I have had to put everything else on hold just to make this class go smoothly. It was the first time at UCLA that I truly loved a class, but this level of progressively ramping-up the commitment to the class every week to the point where it has reframed my every waking moment for the rest of the quarter has sincerely killed my passion for this class. After 7 weeks, I’m now physically managing to survive knowing that it only has 3 more weeks to get worse. I don’t even have the time to feel good about writing this review because it’s eating into my time to do this class’s final presentation draft, final paper draft, and go into the lab to get lymph glands. I hope someone reading this is not immediately deterred from taking this class, but that you at least plan to take EASY classes to work around this behemoth of a class.
Fall 2021 - I have never left a review for a class before. I’m an "A student" and have not had a problem with a class at UCLA before. BUT, after seeing it listed in the classes for W’22, I feel obligated to give an in-person perspective given how different it feels from the online sentiments here, so that people know what they are really signing up for. The professor is amazing as the other reviewers say. She really cares about us learning the material and how research is conducted. She works very hard (even through the night sometimes) to get us all feedback on assignments. I feel that I have learned a lot about research that is truly valuable in the real world beyond any other class so far here at UCLA. Another pro to the class is that she doesn’t care that much about grades. I predict most of the class will get an A, just like other quarters. However, this is by NO MEANS AN EASY A. It seems simple enough: weekly quizzes and M,T,W,R homework assignments are all completion-based and due the next Monday. Completing them sincerely will take a few hours out of your week. Content is hyper-focused, but it is taught well. Seems easy right? The catch is that this ALL CHANGES WITH THE MIDTERM PREP starting WEEK 4. This goes from a 6 unit class to about a 10 unit class in a matter of 2 weeks. You have to write a grant proposal which is very technical, completely cited, includes two scientific figures from scratch, and is upwards of 3000 words in a WEEK. You cannot work ahead on this assignment, you only get a week. Then, the professor will give you upwards of +100 in-depth, technical comments on that paper to incorporate into the next draft in another week. And she then encourages you to turn that draft in BEFORE the week is up so that you can receive another 70-80 comments on the draft and incorporate all of that information in whatever time you have left. To be fair, the professor did give a lot of extensions to students who were struggling to keep up with this massive homework assignment in Week 4, but they were a day or two beyond the week deadline. For reference, I dumped about 50 hours of my life into writing this assignment over those two weeks. Then at the beginning of Week 6, you go from theoretical readings and a little bit of lab practice in the scheduled two 3-hour times to a commitment paralleling joining an actual research lab here (+10 ADDITIONAL lab hours a week) ON TOP of regular course work for the class. You need to be in the lab to dissect, stage, and image 15 lymph glands using a process that some graduate students struggle with. This is the only thing I have encountered at UCLA which is truly SKILL-based. If you suck at dissecting things smaller than your forceps in timed, 20 minute windows, you just need to put in more time and set up more crosses. Lots of the "best" (most technically and mechanically adept) students have struggled to even get 7-8 lymph glands after about 10-12 additional hours of work a week because you can loose them at every stage in the process and are very fragile. The online students were just given images, but we have had to create all of our data ourselves. It pushed this class from borderline manageable to near impossible if you had a full schedule where you expected this class to only be 6 units large (15-18 hours a week total). I have had to put everything else on hold just to make this class go smoothly. It was the first time at UCLA that I truly loved a class, but this level of progressively ramping-up the commitment to the class every week to the point where it has reframed my every waking moment for the rest of the quarter has sincerely killed my passion for this class. After 7 weeks, I’m now physically managing to survive knowing that it only has 3 more weeks to get worse. I don’t even have the time to feel good about writing this review because it’s eating into my time to do this class’s final presentation draft, final paper draft, and go into the lab to get lymph glands. I hope someone reading this is not immediately deterred from taking this class, but that you at least plan to take EASY classes to work around this behemoth of a class.
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