Summer 2020
CHEM 162, BIOL 200, CHID 110
CHEM 162
Taking this class last quarter was frustrating: our professor had us watch Panopto recordings of her lectures that went as far back as 2017, the lack of structure in quiz sections made it difficult to engage with my peers, and no matter how much I studied, I wasn't clicking with the content and it showed in my scores. I knew I could do better, so I withdrew from the class. I realized it's important to know when to quit and that it's okay to quit sometimes. Looking back on it now, I know it was the best decision I could have made.
This quarter, I was blessed with an incredible professor who structured her class in a way that if you put in the work, you could succeed. I've never felt so engaged with a subject: I answered my peers' questions in the chat during lectures, I did the suggested practice problems in the textbook every day, I circled the ones I got wrong and asked about them in office hours, I enjoyed working with my peers in quiz sections and volunteered to share our answers with the class. On the first quiz, I got a 46/46. On the second quiz? I got another 46/46. I felt like I was at a turning point. I started to look forward to exams rather than fearing them because I saw them as celebrations of my knowledge. It was unbelievable to realize that for all I know, l could have failed this class last quarter but with the right professor and the right resources, I was excelling.
The biggest advantage that comes with the online format of this class is getting to use our notes on exams. I learned how to make efficient study guides that would be easy to reference during the exam, one of which is shown on the right. My professor always provided us with a list of the types of questions that would be on the exam so this gave me the opportunity to predict what those questions would be. For one of the exams, we were told that one of the questions would be a free response. I correctly predicted what the question would be and already had a response prepared when I saw the question during the exam. This was an important tool for me to really apply the material that we learned.
Another contributing factor to my performance in this class was the lab reports. I've always done well on lab reports but acing five of them in a row was a testament to how much work I put into this class. In CHEM 142 and 152, I often kept lecture material separate from the lab material, even though the latter was always meant to supplement the former. In this class, I had moments where I realized the purpose of these labs and how they connected to what we were learning in class, which greatly improved my analysis in the discussion section of the reports. Overall, I'm so proud of how I finished the CHEM sequence on a strong note and I'm always going to remember this class as one of my favorites.
BIOL 200
I came into this class feeling confident after doing well in BIOL 180 but because the exams were an hour and 20 minutes rather than 22 hours, I had to change the way I studied. With 22 hour exams, we were expected to remember every tiny detail and provide specific responses. The opposite was true for the exams in this class, where we had to see the big picture and figure out how everything connected, a skill I have always struggled with. I experimented a lot with different study methods: I tried making flow charts as well as extremely detailed study guides. By the time of the final exam, I found the method that worked for me: summarizing big concepts from every lecture in a page or two, as seen on the right.
If there's one thing I loved about this class, it was the content that we learned, which made studying a lot more fun. My favorite unit was the one on adaptive and innate immunity; it was fascinating to navigate how our bodies identify and fight off foreign cells. I also enjoyed our final take-home exam, where we made a proposal to a politician and reviewed the use of CRISPR or ELISA to address a biological problem. I chose to look at CRISPR in Huntington's disease and it was exciting to apply all the knowledge I gained from this quarter to a real life problem. My professor loved my diagrams, one of which is shown on the left, and gave me full marks. This class made me remember why I love biology and I can't wait to see what BIOL 220 has in store.
CHID 110
Throughout the quarter, we studied the concepts of imagination and aesthetic education. At first, I dreaded the idea of having two group projects for this class, as I've heard how difficult it is to work with a group over Zoom. Fortunately, I had a wonderful group of peers for those projects and it was actually really fun to work through the material with them. This class was heavily reading based but like my professor said, it was kind of impossible to fall behind. Each week, we simply had to do a journal entry for a passage from the assigned reading, which reminded me of the reading logs I was so fond of in elementary school. The best part of the class was watching Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, one of my favorite films, and getting to guide my peers and professor through the cultural details that I noticed as a Korean American. For my final project, I combined Parasite and an essay that we read by Ursula K. Le Guin to fabricate an interview between Le Guin and Bong, addressing the ideas of aesthetic education. It's my favorite creative assignment I've done at UW and I'm so glad I had the opportunity to take this class.
