This class was the bane of my existence. I would rather be in BE 100 than this class any day. Besides a handful of guest lecturers, this class was pretty much a waste of time and it has wayyyyy too much busy work for a two-unit class. I can see this class being semi-useful if you are a freshman. But if you are a sophomore or a transfer (junior) it is pretty much a waste of time. I am not someone who leaves everything for the last minute but this class was super annoying in that I always ended up leaving all the work last minute.

The class has two long article summaries which u have to write in single space, 11pt font, and a final summary about what you learned, and a bunch of other busy work. My best advice is to try and get all the assignments as early as you can so that you can focus on your other classes that actually matter. The assignments are not hard, they are just extremely pointless and boring.

This class was a good introduction to what you can do with a BioE degree (as advertised). As someone who wants to take a more environmental and less medical approach to BioE, the class was VERY med focused, which was a little disappointing, but reflective of the current state of the industry.
The class itself was not hard, but it was A LOT more work than all the other engineering seminars for no good reason. You get a lot of practice reading academic papers and a start on your career/internship searches though.

This is the intro to bioengineering seminar, which incoming freshmen and incoming transfers into bioengineering take. It's a 2 unit class as opposed to the 1 unit class of literally every other engineering major because there's more work. Like there's an actual lecture and a discussion, and you have to go to all of them.

The lecture is comprised of guest speakers coming every week, and you have to make weekly journal entries on them which you turn in.

During discussion, you usually do something based on a reading assignment you get for the week, and you have to annotate the reading on Perusall and respond to people's comments. It's tedious but fine.

There are two article summaries you have to do for this class. The first one is a group one, and the second one is individual. You really need to plan ahead for it. My group took 3 days for the article summary and got an A, but I knew other groups that got C's and B's on the summary.

Other than the article summaries, there's a bunch of other busy work such as searching for a job, taking this useless life values survey, and a career essay at the very end that summarizes what you learned.

It's meant to be an easy A, but the work involved is way more than other engineering seminars.

Looks like a lot of work, really isn't. Kinda boring tho but its a required course so whatever.

Basically, an A in this class is guaranteed. However, you do have to put a relatively heavy amount of work in for a 2 unit class. The article summary takes a very long time to do. It took me like 12 hours, and that's not even longer than average. Definitely start a few days in advance. The podcast was annoying, but the bar is set very low for an A on that so don't stress. You can skip lecture if you want, because you only have to ask one question, and once that's done it doesn't matter. However, the guest lecturers were often pretty interesting so I liked going (most of the time) anyway. The second part of lecture, which he calls "writing workshop," is literally completely useless and basically the equivalent to 6th grade English class. Feel free to leave after the guest lecturer. A nice little GPA booster with no stress, but more work than it should be.

Our grading scheme ended up being 10% in-class question (ask once throughout the quarter), 15% a library assignment, 25% article summary, 10% abstract, 35% for the group podcast, and 5% for some surveys/questionnaires.

This class basically just consists of guest lecturers coming every week and talking about their research. We had a few assignments due throughout the quarter based on the class reading articles and summarizing them/utilizing library tools. Final project was a group project based off a chosen topic (we were given a list). The work load was pretty light in the first few weeks but we ended up having this 12-15 minute podcast assignment due week 10, which was not fun to worry about during finals. If anything, I'd follow the recommended schedule and get writing and recording done early.