Emily Putnam
Professor Putnam is very passionate about the topic of cell biology. The teaching style in this course relies heavily on lecture and reading that apply to a weekly homework comprehensive homework assignment. The questions on the homework are typically much harder than the questions on exams, so it is very possible to get a good grade if you show up and do what is asked of you.
I took this course with Professor Putnam, and I really enjoyed it. She makes the content very interesting and uses case studies to apply it to real-world events. There were problem sets due each week with textbook reading for each class. Exams were straightforward, and you could do revisions if you got less than a 90%.
This class was really fun and gave me a good base for future bio classes. The lecture covered a lot of material but built up to it, so the first few weeks of class were pretty slow (possibly too slow) and the last few flew by with lots of readings and very fast lectures. I had a chemistry background going into this class and think it helped but I don't think you need one to do well. Problem sets and exams were pretty easy and didn't take much time at all -- I actually wish the exams were weighted a little more (they were only 5% of our grade!!) because it was hard to motivate myself to study for exams. By far the hardest part of this class were the lab reports, I felt like we weren't given enough structure and I often wasn't sure what they were looking for but they did build up to more complex reports well. Go to office hours for lab if you are confused because it's easy to get behind, it's worth it to put in the time on prelabs so you can walk into lab knowing what you're doing and why!
This class was really fun and gave me a good base for future bio classes. The lecture covered a lot of material but built up to it, so the first few weeks of class were pretty slow (possibly too slow) and the last few flew by with lots of readings and very fast lectures. I had a chemistry background going into this class and think it …Read more