Erik Solhaug

I loved taking this course with Erik. He is extremely enthusiastic and wants his students to learn and care. He did not have any tests and it was largely project based. We also were given a lot of freedom in lab and on the project subjects.

This class uses labor-based grading so if you complete all of the assignments and put in effort it is not hard to do well. Professor Solhaug wasn't always super effective in conveying the ideas in lecture but the textbook was helpful and he was very enthusiastic. He was also very willing to go over things multiple times and was super helpful in office hours!

This class was all effort based which made it really easy to dive into your interests. If you demonstrate your hard work ethic on assignments, you'll get a 100 in this class. I found that a lot of the questions we were asked to answer for homework were very advanced, and I didn't have a good enough understand just from lecture to answer them, so I often did a deep dive of things online. If you find yourself doing this, just make sure to cite your sources, because I was including concepts that I learned from scientific journals as opposed to the textbook, which helped me learn, but it is important to demonstrate that you're not just resorting to AI to answer the questions, because it takes the point of the effort-based assignments away. Otherwise this course was super easy and low-stakes, easy A, but a lot of work because you do have to develop good understanding of the material and demonstrate that in the assignments. My favorite part of the course was the reading reflections, where we got to write about whatever we wanted biology related, and I learned SO much in doing this. I learned things that were specific to my own life through these deep dives. My only concern from this course is that if you're planning on taking more bio courses or the MCAT, you don't have any memorization of concepts under your belt because there are no exams, and you're only answering random advanced questions that sometimes do more harm than good for long-term learning.

This class was all effort based which made it really easy to dive into your interests. If you demonstrate your hard work ethic on assignments, you'll get a 100 in this class. I found that a lot of the questions we were asked to answer for homework were very advanced, and I didn't have a good enough understand just from lecture to ans …Read more