C&S BIO M187 is the crowning capstone of the CaSB major (required for the CaSB minors and an elective for other major like CS). On paper, the class is fairly easy and straightforward: Your goal is to submit a research poster to the W9 poster session (graciously paid for by the department, which is pretty cool), a research presentation for the final W10 grading, and a final paper. You have regular assignments (weekly practice presentations, biweekly paper submissions, & one poster submission) to keep you on track. Another plus is that you get to see/hear a lot of pretty interesting of research projects that other people are doing.

But as any senior who's taken this class or been in the major will tell you, there's a glaring lack of communication that seems to characterize the CaSB department. In some ways, it's small things like not having a Canvas page for the class and instead running the class via a shared GDrive folder + emails. People with PTEs (required if you haven't taken C&S BIO/EEB M150) -- good luck with getting all of the emails because there doesn't seem to be a centralized email list that's shared between TAs and the professor. You will also only see each TA/professor twice the entire quarter, which prevents meaningful feedback the first time they see it (so, half of the quarter), and generally limits how much the research presentation can be improved. Make sure you join the groupme because you/your classmates emailing the professor will be your main source of class updates. After all, TAs are *not* briefed before class on what the structure/due assignments are for this & next week, so they will all (to no fault of their own) make an educated guess different from the next TA/professor you ask; to this day, I still do not know how/if my weekly presentations were graded. Many of us were frequently confused throughout the quarter -- things like what was due (and when), where classes are (e.g. the first meeting was on Zoom but this was only shared a day or two before iirc + some sections moved classes and there was confusion about that too), when and how to get our poster printed. I won't even get into the whole "people scrambling to get research to complete this mandatory capstone class" mess.

All in all, I feel that the TAs & professors were genuinely trying to do their best to make things work, but it felt more like they were taking water off a ship with cups when the issue is that there's actually a gaping hole at the bottom. I'm sure things will improve as the department gets more established, but for a mandatory, final class that completes the major, there are definitely things to improve.

TL;DR easy ✅ organized ❌

For this class, attending lecture was not mandatory while attending lab was mandatory. The material covered in lecture was not important and I stopped watching the recordings after a week into the quarter. The only time I had to go to lecture was when we did our presentations (super easy). I didn’t like how we had to go to lab because it felt like everything we talked about (using GenSAS) could’ve been a step-by-step guide sent over email. Lab sessions were taught by TAs, so I barely saw the professor during the quarter. Go to the TA office hours to get an idea of what they want in your presentation and final paper because they do all the grading for the class.

MCDB 187AL

Easy lab requirement

55% Final paper
45% 3 presentations

This is a computer-based lab that focuses on gene annotation. The first two weeks of lab is basically all you need to understand what to do in the class. There are 3 5-minute individual presentations. He asks questions during the presentations but they're not hardcore or mean questions like other professors ask. So as long as you have an idea of what you put on your PPT slides, you're good.

Very chill professor. Goes over all the algorithms behind the programs and software you're using during lecture but he doesn't test you on them. Since this is basically a project-based course, as long as you finish your project then you don't need to go to the lab at all. The lab is 3 hours a day, two days a week. I felt this time was more allocated for asking the TA questions. So you can drop by and ask a couple questions and then not come back the entire week.

Overall, very doable lab and a very smart professor. Annotation may be confusing at first but, like the professor said, once you complete your first gene, you pretty much know how to do the rest of the genes. I highly recommend taking this over MCDB 104AL. Even a doctor at the Ronald Reagan Hospital took MCDB 104AL and told me to avoid at all costs.

187AL is a purely computer-based bioinformatics lab. You don't need any previous knowledge or particular skill set to succeed, aside from being generally competent with a computer. All work is completed during the lab section (3 hours/day, twice a week). Lectures (75 minutes/day, twice a week) are solely for providing background information on the programs you'll be using throughout the quarter and for student presentations (3 weeks-worth total). Your grade is three 5-minute "progress report style" presentations (15% each) which you pretty much get full points just for presenting on what you've worked on so far, and the final lab report (55%) which is approximately 15 pages long, give or take a few pages. You spend the first few weeks familiarizing your self with the tools/programs needed to annotate a genome (gene prediction, gene alignment, gene editing, RNA-seq, etc.) By Week 6, you should generally understand the entire annotation workflow you need to complete and the rest of the quarter is spent annotating a second/third gene and continuously refining your data. Draft sections of the lab report are due at the end of the week (intro, methods, abstract, etc.) throughout the quarter which is useful because it makes you stay on top of your report. The lab can be laborious and the software can be temperamental but this is not a difficult class whatsoever as long as you manage your time well.

Pretty hard class. Gotta have a lot of background knowledge regarding genomics and computers. Take this class if you don't care about your GPA.

If you do not have a good computer background, you will be at a disadvantage when taking this class. It's not impossible, but just keep in mind that even though like 30% got an A, the class size is only 25 people and those people are pretty good with computers. Overall I really enjoyed this class. The material was interesting and the professor was awesome. I was not a fan of the presentations. A bit too much work to get ready. For me at least.